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NOT JUST MOVIES
The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES Miscellaneous (arranged by date published, starting with most recent) - Criminally Underrated, Abel Ferrara. - Enjoy the Silents. - John Ford's Lasting Importance. - Pleasuring Yourself. - Blind Spots 2014. - Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix is America's Greatest Contemporary Actor. - Martin Scorsese, Ranked. - Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked. NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODES 11. Destiny (5x08) It’s been a long time coming, baby. The fight between Angel and Spike gets right to the core of their relationship, and the fight itself is the best in the series. It also tackles what it means to be a hero. The twist following the battle tops the whole thing off with a big laugh. 10. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET Pickup on South Street, his 1953 noir masterpiece, contains the sort of anti-Communist sentiment you'd expect from a cheap genre film in the early '50s, yet its politics are so deliberately vague that producers could simply change some lines in dubbing to change the Communist MacGuffin to drugs in order to play the film in commie-loving France. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALESThe Outlaw Josey
Wales may be the litmus test for Eastwood fans: hidden in plain sight, it is often overlooked by casual appraisers of the director's corpus who tend to leap from Eastwood's stint as an actor in Leone's Dollars trilogy more or less to Unforgiven. NOT JUST MOVIES: CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING The great problem with film criticism -- or at least the shortcomings of my own critical faculties -- is that the best films are often the hardest to describe, both because they grab the viewer in ways that the overwhelming majority of good, bad and ugly movies inure us against and because the critic wants to preserve the effect for theaudience.
NOT JUST MOVIES
The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES Miscellaneous (arranged by date published, starting with most recent) - Criminally Underrated, Abel Ferrara. - Enjoy the Silents. - John Ford's Lasting Importance. - Pleasuring Yourself. - Blind Spots 2014. - Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix is America's Greatest Contemporary Actor. - Martin Scorsese, Ranked. - Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked. NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODES 11. Destiny (5x08) It’s been a long time coming, baby. The fight between Angel and Spike gets right to the core of their relationship, and the fight itself is the best in the series. It also tackles what it means to be a hero. The twist following the battle tops the whole thing off with a big laugh. 10. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET Pickup on South Street, his 1953 noir masterpiece, contains the sort of anti-Communist sentiment you'd expect from a cheap genre film in the early '50s, yet its politics are so deliberately vague that producers could simply change some lines in dubbing to change the Communist MacGuffin to drugs in order to play the film in commie-loving France. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALESThe Outlaw Josey
Wales may be the litmus test for Eastwood fans: hidden in plain sight, it is often overlooked by casual appraisers of the director's corpus who tend to leap from Eastwood's stint as an actor in Leone's Dollars trilogy more or less to Unforgiven. NOT JUST MOVIES: CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING The great problem with film criticism -- or at least the shortcomings of my own critical faculties -- is that the best films are often the hardest to describe, both because they grab the viewer in ways that the overwhelming majority of good, bad and ugly movies inure us against and because the critic wants to preserve the effect for theaudience.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE PRESTIGE Congratulations on a beautifully articulated and intelligently thought-out piece on this great movie. You've comprehensively detailed the things that make this a modern classic: the intricate and perfectly judged structure; Nolan's masterful use, not so much of misdirection, but of hiding things in plain sight; the themes of duality (your comparison of the Angier/Borden rivalry with that of NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR Songs from the Second Floor is a comedy whose laughs are immediately swallowed in its own void, as if a black hole embarked on a stand-up career. The lack of clear direction between some of these vignettes is visualized in the movement of the film's characters. An endless traffic jam fills the streets at all hours of the day, with drivers NOT JUST MOVIES: THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON Jake - You are incredibly prolific! I'm impressed! I like your closing remarks here. Having read Twilight and the first third of New Moon, and having discussed the series with my teenage students who love it or hate it, it's interesting to me that fans are so passionate about a pretty basic love story: the lonely outsider girl torn between two guys.. Also, there's not a lot of conflict in the boo NOT JUST MOVIES: HERE AND ELSEWHERE (JEAN-LUC GODARD Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1975) Partially cobbled together from footage Godard shot in 1970 of a Palestinian insurgency, Here and Elsewhere, his first collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, serves as the final nail in the Dziga Vertov Group's coffin, not only because it uses the last of thegroup's material
NOT JUST MOVIES: KING OF KINGS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1961) Though it begins with the overture and audiovisual bombast expected of a 70mm Biblical epic, King of Kings soon turns into a movie that establishes emotional resonance even as it continues to deliver vast-scale shots of grandeur. Beginning more than 50 years before Christ's birth, Nicholas Ray's film thus dedicates its first images to the sights of Romans sacking Jerusalem, enslaving NOT JUST MOVIES: BORN TO BE BAD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1950) What if Nicholas Ray had directed a Pre-Code? It might resemble Born to Be Bad, a noirish melodrama about a woman unrepentantly destroying the lives of others for her own financial and sexual gratification.Like the fresh-faced and steel-eyed vixen of the contemporaneous All About Eve NOT JUST MOVIES: WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES (NICHOLAS RAY Wind Across the Everglades marked the beginning of the end for Nicholas Ray. After falling ill during several productions during his career and necessitating shots from other directors, Everglades was the first time Ray's substance abuse problems finally got him fired. NOT JUST MOVIES: GANGS OF NEW YORK Gangs of New York is the epic, self-destructive companion piece to Who Shot Liberty Valance. It posits that one need not have traveled out west to find romantic lawlessness, and that one could not find the answers to a more productive society back east. It is also proof that Martin Scorsese can make masterful work no matter the circumstances. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LOVE GURU I have seen the end of the universe, and it is a 91-minute dick joke. The Love Guru is so bad, so piercingly unfunny, that I feel almost that I've aged since I watched it. After it ended, I felt a sharp pain in my back and a stiffness in my joints and checked myselfNOT JUST MOVIES
The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES Miscellaneous (arranged by date published, starting with most recent) - Criminally Underrated, Abel Ferrara. - Enjoy the Silents. - John Ford's Lasting Importance. - Pleasuring Yourself. - Blind Spots 2014. - Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix is America's Greatest Contemporary Actor. - Martin Scorsese, Ranked. - Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked. NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET Pickup on South Street, his 1953 noir masterpiece, contains the sort of anti-Communist sentiment you'd expect from a cheap genre film in the early '50s, yet its politics are so deliberately vague that producers could simply change some lines in dubbing to change the Communist MacGuffin to drugs in order to play the film in commie-loving France. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: FEARLESS (1993) In medium-long shots of a cornfield framing stalks in the middle plane that obscure the background, a disheveled man appears, shrouded by smoke, holding the hand of a young boy and cradling a baby with his free hand. As the man walks through the field, others appear behind him as if dropping fully formed from the stalks, milling about in NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODES 11. Destiny (5x08) It’s been a long time coming, baby. The fight between Angel and Spike gets right to the core of their relationship, and the fight itself is the best in the series. It also tackles what it means to be a hero. The twist following the battle tops the whole thing off with a big laugh. 10. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SOCIAL NETWORK David Fincher's growth as a filmmaker has been both nuanced and startling. His initial pictures are confrontational, reliant upon his experience as a music video director that make pictures like Se7en and Fight Club draining exercises in style. Far from a nihilist, Fincher crafted himself into a deep pessimist who nevertheless fought to findthe good in life.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison.NOT JUST MOVIES
The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES Miscellaneous (arranged by date published, starting with most recent) - Criminally Underrated, Abel Ferrara. - Enjoy the Silents. - John Ford's Lasting Importance. - Pleasuring Yourself. - Blind Spots 2014. - Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix is America's Greatest Contemporary Actor. - Martin Scorsese, Ranked. - Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked. NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET Pickup on South Street, his 1953 noir masterpiece, contains the sort of anti-Communist sentiment you'd expect from a cheap genre film in the early '50s, yet its politics are so deliberately vague that producers could simply change some lines in dubbing to change the Communist MacGuffin to drugs in order to play the film in commie-loving France. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: FEARLESS (1993) In medium-long shots of a cornfield framing stalks in the middle plane that obscure the background, a disheveled man appears, shrouded by smoke, holding the hand of a young boy and cradling a baby with his free hand. As the man walks through the field, others appear behind him as if dropping fully formed from the stalks, milling about in NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODES 11. Destiny (5x08) It’s been a long time coming, baby. The fight between Angel and Spike gets right to the core of their relationship, and the fight itself is the best in the series. It also tackles what it means to be a hero. The twist following the battle tops the whole thing off with a big laugh. 10. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SOCIAL NETWORK David Fincher's growth as a filmmaker has been both nuanced and startling. His initial pictures are confrontational, reliant upon his experience as a music video director that make pictures like Se7en and Fight Club draining exercises in style. Far from a nihilist, Fincher crafted himself into a deep pessimist who nevertheless fought to findthe good in life.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison.NOT JUST MOVIES
The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES Miscellaneous (arranged by date published, starting with most recent) - Criminally Underrated, Abel Ferrara. - Enjoy the Silents. - John Ford's Lasting Importance. - Pleasuring Yourself. - Blind Spots 2014. - Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix is America's Greatest Contemporary Actor. - Martin Scorsese, Ranked. - Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE PRESTIGE Congratulations on a beautifully articulated and intelligently thought-out piece on this great movie. You've comprehensively detailed the things that make this a modern classic: the intricate and perfectly judged structure; Nolan's masterful use, not so much of misdirection, but of hiding things in plain sight; the themes of duality (your comparison of the Angier/Borden rivalry with that of NOT JUST MOVIES: FEARLESS (1993)In medium-long
shots of a cornfield framing stalks in the middle plane that obscure the background, a disheveled man appears, shrouded by NOT JUST MOVIES: HERE AND ELSEWHERE (JEAN-LUC GODARD Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1975) Partially cobbled together from footage Godard shot in 1970 of a Palestinian insurgency, Here and Elsewhere, his first collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, serves as the final nail in the Dziga Vertov Group's coffin, not only because it uses the last of thegroup's material
NOT JUST MOVIES: KING OF KINGS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1961) Though it begins with the overture and audiovisual bombast expected of a 70mm Biblical epic, King of Kings soon turns into a movie that establishes emotional resonance even as it continues to deliver vast-scale shots of grandeur. Beginning more than 50 years before Christ's birth, Nicholas Ray's film thus dedicates its first images to the sights of Romans sacking Jerusalem, enslaving NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LUSTY MEN (NICHOLAS RAY, 1952) The Lusty Men is Nicholas Ray's most desolate and melancholy film, the charting of various paths all leading to the same dead end. It is a story of has-beens, starting where so many of Ray's movies end, with the hero reduced by a tragic act of existential, karmic fate. Its initial flurry of excitement concerning a rodeo coming to town (fromthe
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SOCIAL NETWORK David Fincher's growth as a filmmaker has been both nuanced and startling. His initial pictures are confrontational, reliant upon his experience as a music video director that make pictures like Se7en and Fight Club draining exercises in style. Far from a nihilist, Fincher crafted himself into a deep pessimist who nevertheless fought to findthe good in life.
NOT JUST MOVIES: BORN TO BE BAD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1950) What if Nicholas Ray had directed a Pre-Code? It might resemble Born to Be Bad, a noirish melodrama about a woman unrepentantly destroying the lives of others for her own financial and sexual gratification.Like the fresh-faced and steel-eyed vixen of the contemporaneous All About Eve NOT JUST MOVIES: WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES (NICHOLAS RAY Wind Across the Everglades marked the beginning of the end for Nicholas Ray. After falling ill during several productions during his career and necessitating shots from other directors, Everglades was the first time Ray's substance abuse problems finally got him fired.NOT JUST MOVIES
The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES Miscellaneous (arranged by date published, starting with most recent) - Criminally Underrated, Abel Ferrara. - Enjoy the Silents. - John Ford's Lasting Importance. - Pleasuring Yourself. - Blind Spots 2014. - Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix is America's Greatest Contemporary Actor. - Martin Scorsese, Ranked. - Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked. NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODES 11. Destiny (5x08) It’s been a long time coming, baby. The fight between Angel and Spike gets right to the core of their relationship, and the fight itself is the best in the series. It also tackles what it means to be a hero. The twist following the battle tops the whole thing off with a big laugh. 10. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO! (SERGEI EISENSTEIN Que Viva Mexico! marks the first time Sergei Eisenstein truly hit a wall during production, though unlike his later hassles with Stalin's censors, the director here fell prey to financial limitations and impatience of leftist Westerners whose excitement to work with the great Soviet propagandist soon dissolved with their discretionaryfunds.
NOT JUST MOVIES: BORN TO BE BAD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1950) What if Nicholas Ray had directed a Pre-Code? It might resemble Born to Be Bad, a noirish melodrama about a woman unrepentantly destroying the lives of others for her own financial and sexual gratification.Like the fresh-faced and steel-eyed vixen of the contemporaneous All About Eve NOT JUST MOVIES: CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING The great problem with film criticism -- or at least the shortcomings of my own critical faculties -- is that the best films are often the hardest to describe, both because they grab the viewer in ways that the overwhelming majority of good, bad and ugly movies inure us against and because the critic wants to preserve the effect for theaudience.
NOT JUST MOVIES
The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES Miscellaneous (arranged by date published, starting with most recent) - Criminally Underrated, Abel Ferrara. - Enjoy the Silents. - John Ford's Lasting Importance. - Pleasuring Yourself. - Blind Spots 2014. - Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix is America's Greatest Contemporary Actor. - Martin Scorsese, Ranked. - Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked. NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODES 11. Destiny (5x08) It’s been a long time coming, baby. The fight between Angel and Spike gets right to the core of their relationship, and the fight itself is the best in the series. It also tackles what it means to be a hero. The twist following the battle tops the whole thing off with a big laugh. 10. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO! (SERGEI EISENSTEIN Que Viva Mexico! marks the first time Sergei Eisenstein truly hit a wall during production, though unlike his later hassles with Stalin's censors, the director here fell prey to financial limitations and impatience of leftist Westerners whose excitement to work with the great Soviet propagandist soon dissolved with their discretionaryfunds.
NOT JUST MOVIES: BORN TO BE BAD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1950) What if Nicholas Ray had directed a Pre-Code? It might resemble Born to Be Bad, a noirish melodrama about a woman unrepentantly destroying the lives of others for her own financial and sexual gratification.Like the fresh-faced and steel-eyed vixen of the contemporaneous All About Eve NOT JUST MOVIES: CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING The great problem with film criticism -- or at least the shortcomings of my own critical faculties -- is that the best films are often the hardest to describe, both because they grab the viewer in ways that the overwhelming majority of good, bad and ugly movies inure us against and because the critic wants to preserve the effect for theaudience.
NOT JUST MOVIES: KING OF KINGS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1961) Though it begins with the overture and audiovisual bombast expected of a 70mm Biblical epic, King of Kings soon turns into a movie that establishes emotional resonance even as it continues to deliver vast-scale shots of grandeur. Beginning more than 50 years before Christ's birth, Nicholas Ray's film thus dedicates its first images to the sights of Romans sacking Jerusalem, enslaving NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: BORN TO BE BAD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1950) What if Nicholas Ray had directed a Pre-Code? It might resemble Born to Be Bad, a noirish melodrama about a woman unrepentantly destroying the lives of others for her own financial and sexual gratification.Like the fresh-faced and steel-eyed vixen of the contemporaneous All About Eve NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LUSTY MEN (NICHOLAS RAY, 1952) The Lusty Men is Nicholas Ray's most desolate and melancholy film, the charting of various paths all leading to the same dead end. It is a story of has-beens, starting where so many of Ray's movies end, with the hero reduced by a tragic act of existential, karmic fate. Its initial flurry of excitement concerning a rodeo coming to town (fromthe
NOT JUST MOVIES: HERE AND ELSEWHERE (JEAN-LUC GODARD Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1975) Partially cobbled together from footage Godard shot in 1970 of a Palestinian insurgency, Here and Elsewhere, his first collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, serves as the final nail in the Dziga Vertov Group's coffin, not only because it uses the last of thegroup's material
NOT JUST MOVIES: ULYSSES, CHAPTER TEN: THE WANDERING ROCKS Comprising 18 vignettes and a coda, the Wandering Rocks chapter shatters the narrative of Stephen and Leopold to follow numerous other characters, some of whom we know already (either from this novel or Joyce's other work), others who just sort of pop up. Each wanders the streets of Dublin as the cavalcade containing the Earl of Dudley, his NOT JUST MOVIES: FEARLESS (1993) In medium-long shots of a cornfield framing stalks in the middle plane that obscure the background, a disheveled man appears, shrouded by smoke, holding the hand of a young boy and cradling a baby with his free hand. As the man walks through the field, others appear behind him as if dropping fully formed from the stalks, milling about in NOT JUST MOVIES: SUPER 8 (J.J. ABRAMS, 2011) That Super 8 has the audacity to arrive on a marketing platform billing it as an original film is more a testament to the cesspool of derivative sequels, reboots and unimaginative new franchises that have already made this, the Summer of Sequel, such a perfunctory, unengaging play for box office receipts. In this climate, an earnest (if borderline shameless) tribute to the director least in NOT JUST MOVIES: BLACK BOOK Black Book may be the first Holocaust film to be shot in primary colors. Vibrant reds, blues and yellows fill the screen, and all are present on the heroine, a Jew hiding in plain sight in The Hague with dyed-blond hair, sparkling blue eyes and a dash of red lipstick to drive men so crazy with lust that they couldn't care less about herethnicity.
NOT JUST MOVIES: DAY OF WRATH (CARL THEODOR DREYER, 1943) Predating Arthur Miller's The Crucible by a decade, Carl Theodor Dreyer's own witch hunt allegory is not only politically braver—he managed to get away with making it under Denmark's Nazi occupation—but more morally complex. Its scathing view of institutions goes beyond any one target, even one as pervasively evil as the Third Reich, to indict the pettiness and paranoia not overcomeby
NOT JUST MOVIES
The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES Miscellaneous (arranged by date published, starting with most recent) - Criminally Underrated, Abel Ferrara. - Enjoy the Silents. - John Ford's Lasting Importance. - Pleasuring Yourself. - Blind Spots 2014. - Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix is America's Greatest Contemporary Actor. - Martin Scorsese, Ranked. - Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked. NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODES 11. Destiny (5x08) It’s been a long time coming, baby. The fight between Angel and Spike gets right to the core of their relationship, and the fight itself is the best in the series. It also tackles what it means to be a hero. The twist following the battle tops the whole thing off with a big laugh. 10. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO! (SERGEI EISENSTEIN Que Viva Mexico! marks the first time Sergei Eisenstein truly hit a wall during production, though unlike his later hassles with Stalin's censors, the director here fell prey to financial limitations and impatience of leftist Westerners whose excitement to work with the great Soviet propagandist soon dissolved with their discretionaryfunds.
NOT JUST MOVIES: BORN TO BE BAD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1950) What if Nicholas Ray had directed a Pre-Code? It might resemble Born to Be Bad, a noirish melodrama about a woman unrepentantly destroying the lives of others for her own financial and sexual gratification.Like the fresh-faced and steel-eyed vixen of the contemporaneous All About Eve NOT JUST MOVIES: CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING The great problem with film criticism -- or at least the shortcomings of my own critical faculties -- is that the best films are often the hardest to describe, both because they grab the viewer in ways that the overwhelming majority of good, bad and ugly movies inure us against and because the critic wants to preserve the effect for theaudience.
NOT JUST MOVIES
The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES Miscellaneous (arranged by date published, starting with most recent) - Criminally Underrated, Abel Ferrara. - Enjoy the Silents. - John Ford's Lasting Importance. - Pleasuring Yourself. - Blind Spots 2014. - Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix is America's Greatest Contemporary Actor. - Martin Scorsese, Ranked. - Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked. NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODES 11. Destiny (5x08) It’s been a long time coming, baby. The fight between Angel and Spike gets right to the core of their relationship, and the fight itself is the best in the series. It also tackles what it means to be a hero. The twist following the battle tops the whole thing off with a big laugh. 10. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO! (SERGEI EISENSTEIN Que Viva Mexico! marks the first time Sergei Eisenstein truly hit a wall during production, though unlike his later hassles with Stalin's censors, the director here fell prey to financial limitations and impatience of leftist Westerners whose excitement to work with the great Soviet propagandist soon dissolved with their discretionaryfunds.
NOT JUST MOVIES: BORN TO BE BAD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1950) What if Nicholas Ray had directed a Pre-Code? It might resemble Born to Be Bad, a noirish melodrama about a woman unrepentantly destroying the lives of others for her own financial and sexual gratification.Like the fresh-faced and steel-eyed vixen of the contemporaneous All About Eve NOT JUST MOVIES: CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING The great problem with film criticism -- or at least the shortcomings of my own critical faculties -- is that the best films are often the hardest to describe, both because they grab the viewer in ways that the overwhelming majority of good, bad and ugly movies inure us against and because the critic wants to preserve the effect for theaudience.
NOT JUST MOVIES: KING OF KINGS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1961) Though it begins with the overture and audiovisual bombast expected of a 70mm Biblical epic, King of Kings soon turns into a movie that establishes emotional resonance even as it continues to deliver vast-scale shots of grandeur. Beginning more than 50 years before Christ's birth, Nicholas Ray's film thus dedicates its first images to the sights of Romans sacking Jerusalem, enslaving NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: BORN TO BE BAD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1950) What if Nicholas Ray had directed a Pre-Code? It might resemble Born to Be Bad, a noirish melodrama about a woman unrepentantly destroying the lives of others for her own financial and sexual gratification.Like the fresh-faced and steel-eyed vixen of the contemporaneous All About Eve NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LUSTY MEN (NICHOLAS RAY, 1952) The Lusty Men is Nicholas Ray's most desolate and melancholy film, the charting of various paths all leading to the same dead end. It is a story of has-beens, starting where so many of Ray's movies end, with the hero reduced by a tragic act of existential, karmic fate. Its initial flurry of excitement concerning a rodeo coming to town (fromthe
NOT JUST MOVIES: HERE AND ELSEWHERE (JEAN-LUC GODARD Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1975) Partially cobbled together from footage Godard shot in 1970 of a Palestinian insurgency, Here and Elsewhere, his first collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, serves as the final nail in the Dziga Vertov Group's coffin, not only because it uses the last of thegroup's material
NOT JUST MOVIES: ULYSSES, CHAPTER TEN: THE WANDERING ROCKS Comprising 18 vignettes and a coda, the Wandering Rocks chapter shatters the narrative of Stephen and Leopold to follow numerous other characters, some of whom we know already (either from this novel or Joyce's other work), others who just sort of pop up. Each wanders the streets of Dublin as the cavalcade containing the Earl of Dudley, his NOT JUST MOVIES: FEARLESS (1993) In medium-long shots of a cornfield framing stalks in the middle plane that obscure the background, a disheveled man appears, shrouded by smoke, holding the hand of a young boy and cradling a baby with his free hand. As the man walks through the field, others appear behind him as if dropping fully formed from the stalks, milling about in NOT JUST MOVIES: SUPER 8 (J.J. ABRAMS, 2011) That Super 8 has the audacity to arrive on a marketing platform billing it as an original film is more a testament to the cesspool of derivative sequels, reboots and unimaginative new franchises that have already made this, the Summer of Sequel, such a perfunctory, unengaging play for box office receipts. In this climate, an earnest (if borderline shameless) tribute to the director least in NOT JUST MOVIES: BLACK BOOK Black Book may be the first Holocaust film to be shot in primary colors. Vibrant reds, blues and yellows fill the screen, and all are present on the heroine, a Jew hiding in plain sight in The Hague with dyed-blond hair, sparkling blue eyes and a dash of red lipstick to drive men so crazy with lust that they couldn't care less about herethnicity.
NOT JUST MOVIES: DAY OF WRATH (CARL THEODOR DREYER, 1943) Predating Arthur Miller's The Crucible by a decade, Carl Theodor Dreyer's own witch hunt allegory is not only politically braver—he managed to get away with making it under Denmark's Nazi occupation—but more morally complex. Its scathing view of institutions goes beyond any one target, even one as pervasively evil as the Third Reich, to indict the pettiness and paranoia not overcomeby
NOT JUST MOVIES
The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES Miscellaneous (arranged by date published, starting with most recent) - Criminally Underrated, Abel Ferrara. - Enjoy the Silents. - John Ford's Lasting Importance. - Pleasuring Yourself. - Blind Spots 2014. - Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix is America's Greatest Contemporary Actor. - Martin Scorsese, Ranked. - Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked. NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET Pickup on South Street, his 1953 noir masterpiece, contains the sort of anti-Communist sentiment you'd expect from a cheap genre film in the early '50s, yet its politics are so deliberately vague that producers could simply change some lines in dubbing to change the Communist MacGuffin to drugs in order to play the film in commie-loving France. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODES 11. Destiny (5x08) It’s been a long time coming, baby. The fight between Angel and Spike gets right to the core of their relationship, and the fight itself is the best in the series. It also tackles what it means to be a hero. The twist following the battle tops the whole thing off with a big laugh. 10. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE PRESTIGE The combination of Angier's charisma and Borden's ambition makes for a lucrative partnership, but a few gently ominous lines about Borden's knot-tying in relation to the water escape trick leads to tragedy when Julia drowns on-stage, unable to free herself from the NOT JUST MOVIES: ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO! (SERGEI EISENSTEIN Que Viva Mexico! marks the first time Sergei Eisenstein truly hit a wall during production, though unlike his later hassles with Stalin's censors, the director here fell prey to financial limitations and impatience of leftist Westerners whose excitement to work with the great Soviet propagandist soon dissolved with their discretionaryfunds.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison.NOT JUST MOVIES
The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES Miscellaneous (arranged by date published, starting with most recent) - Criminally Underrated, Abel Ferrara. - Enjoy the Silents. - John Ford's Lasting Importance. - Pleasuring Yourself. - Blind Spots 2014. - Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix is America's Greatest Contemporary Actor. - Martin Scorsese, Ranked. - Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked. NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET Pickup on South Street, his 1953 noir masterpiece, contains the sort of anti-Communist sentiment you'd expect from a cheap genre film in the early '50s, yet its politics are so deliberately vague that producers could simply change some lines in dubbing to change the Communist MacGuffin to drugs in order to play the film in commie-loving France. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODES 11. Destiny (5x08) It’s been a long time coming, baby. The fight between Angel and Spike gets right to the core of their relationship, and the fight itself is the best in the series. It also tackles what it means to be a hero. The twist following the battle tops the whole thing off with a big laugh. 10. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE PRESTIGE The combination of Angier's charisma and Borden's ambition makes for a lucrative partnership, but a few gently ominous lines about Borden's knot-tying in relation to the water escape trick leads to tragedy when Julia drowns on-stage, unable to free herself from the NOT JUST MOVIES: ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO! (SERGEI EISENSTEIN Que Viva Mexico! marks the first time Sergei Eisenstein truly hit a wall during production, though unlike his later hassles with Stalin's censors, the director here fell prey to financial limitations and impatience of leftist Westerners whose excitement to work with the great Soviet propagandist soon dissolved with their discretionaryfunds.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. NOT JUST MOVIES: HERE AND ELSEWHERE (JEAN-LUC GODARD Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1975) Partially cobbled together from footage Godard shot in 1970 of a Palestinian insurgency, Here and Elsewhere, his first collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, serves as the final nail in the Dziga Vertov Group's coffin, not only because it uses the last of thegroup's material
NOT JUST MOVIES: FEARLESS (1993)In medium-long
shots of a cornfield framing stalks in the middle plane that obscure the background, a disheveled man appears, shrouded by NOT JUST MOVIES: KING OF KINGS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1961) Though it begins with the overture and audiovisual bombast expected of a 70mm Biblical epic, King of Kings soon turns into a movie that establishes emotional resonance even as it continues to deliver vast-scale shots of grandeur. Beginning more than 50 years before Christ's birth, Nicholas Ray's film thus dedicates its first images to the sights of Romans sacking Jerusalem, enslaving NOT JUST MOVIES: THE PRESTIGE The combination of Angier's charisma and Borden's ambition makes for a lucrative partnership, but a few gently ominous lines about Borden's knot-tying in relation to the water escape trick leads to tragedy when Julia drowns on-stage, unable to free herself from the NOT JUST MOVIES: GANGS OF NEW YORK Gangs of New York is the epic, self-destructive companion piece to Who Shot Liberty Valance. It posits that one need not have traveled out west to find romantic lawlessness, and that one could not find the answers to a more productive society back east. It is also proof that Martin Scorsese can make masterful work no matter the circumstances. NOT JUST MOVIES: BLACK BOOK Black Book may be the first Holocaust film to be shot in primary colors. Vibrant reds, blues and yellows fill the screen, and all are present on the heroine, a Jew hiding in plain sight in The Hague with dyed-blond hair, sparkling blue eyes and a dash of red lipstick to drive men so crazy with lust that they couldn't care less about herethnicity.
NOT JUST MOVIES: BORN TO BE BAD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1950) What if Nicholas Ray had directed a Pre-Code? It might resemble Born to Be Bad, a noirish melodrama about a woman unrepentantly destroying the lives of others for her own financial and sexual gratification.Like the fresh-faced and steel-eyed vixen of the contemporaneous All About Eve NOT JUST MOVIES: BRIAN DE PALMA: FEMME FATALE Brian De Palma: Femme Fatale. After the reception of Mission to Mars took some of the wind out of De Palma's sails, Femme Fatale represented a more modestly scaled return to the director's well of head-trip thrillers. But fresh off the (perceived) defeat of his least ironic bid for a winsomely broad-audience movie, De Palma came up withwhat
NOT JUST MOVIES: SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD Made only a decade after he first garnered attention for his Britcom, Spaced, Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World could serve as a bookend to his brief but infinitely rewarding career to this point. Spaced was about the VCR Generation, late-Gen-X slackers who communicated solely through pop culture references to cult movies and genre T.V. shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. NOT JUST MOVIES: DEVIN TOWNSEND PROJECT Devin Townsend Project — Addicted. From now on, when someone espouses the opinion that drugs fuel artistic creativity, let us hope that enough people know the name of Devin Townsend to dismiss such repugnant, irresponsible nonsense. Following his 2007 effort, thescattershot, one-man band effort Ziltoid the Omniscient, a wearyTownsend
NOT JUST MOVIES
The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES Miscellaneous (arranged by date published, starting with most recent) - Criminally Underrated, Abel Ferrara. - Enjoy the Silents. - John Ford's Lasting Importance. - Pleasuring Yourself. - Blind Spots 2014. - Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix is America's Greatest Contemporary Actor. - Martin Scorsese, Ranked. - Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked. NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET Pickup on South Street, his 1953 noir masterpiece, contains the sort of anti-Communist sentiment you'd expect from a cheap genre film in the early '50s, yet its politics are so deliberately vague that producers could simply change some lines in dubbing to change the Communist MacGuffin to drugs in order to play the film in commie-loving France. NOT JUST MOVIES: FEARLESS (1993) In medium-long shots of a cornfield framing stalks in the middle plane that obscure the background, a disheveled man appears, shrouded by smoke, holding the hand of a young boy and cradling a baby with his free hand. As the man walks through the field, others appear behind him as if dropping fully formed from the stalks, milling about in NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODES 11. Destiny (5x08) It’s been a long time coming, baby. The fight between Angel and Spike gets right to the core of their relationship, and the fight itself is the best in the series. It also tackles what it means to be a hero. The twist following the battle tops the whole thing off with a big laugh. 10. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. NOT JUST MOVIES: ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO! (SERGEI EISENSTEIN Que Viva Mexico! marks the first time Sergei Eisenstein truly hit a wall during production, though unlike his later hassles with Stalin's censors, the director here fell prey to financial limitations and impatience of leftist Westerners whose excitement to work with the great Soviet propagandist soon dissolved with their discretionaryfunds.
NOT JUST MOVIES
The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES Miscellaneous (arranged by date published, starting with most recent) - Criminally Underrated, Abel Ferrara. - Enjoy the Silents. - John Ford's Lasting Importance. - Pleasuring Yourself. - Blind Spots 2014. - Him: Why Joaquin Phoenix is America's Greatest Contemporary Actor. - Martin Scorsese, Ranked. - Charlie Chaplin's Features, Ranked. NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET Pickup on South Street, his 1953 noir masterpiece, contains the sort of anti-Communist sentiment you'd expect from a cheap genre film in the early '50s, yet its politics are so deliberately vague that producers could simply change some lines in dubbing to change the Communist MacGuffin to drugs in order to play the film in commie-loving France. NOT JUST MOVIES: FEARLESS (1993) In medium-long shots of a cornfield framing stalks in the middle plane that obscure the background, a disheveled man appears, shrouded by smoke, holding the hand of a young boy and cradling a baby with his free hand. As the man walks through the field, others appear behind him as if dropping fully formed from the stalks, milling about in NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODES 11. Destiny (5x08) It’s been a long time coming, baby. The fight between Angel and Spike gets right to the core of their relationship, and the fight itself is the best in the series. It also tackles what it means to be a hero. The twist following the battle tops the whole thing off with a big laugh. 10. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. NOT JUST MOVIES: ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO! (SERGEI EISENSTEIN Que Viva Mexico! marks the first time Sergei Eisenstein truly hit a wall during production, though unlike his later hassles with Stalin's censors, the director here fell prey to financial limitations and impatience of leftist Westerners whose excitement to work with the great Soviet propagandist soon dissolved with their discretionaryfunds.
NOT JUST MOVIES: HERE AND ELSEWHERE (JEAN-LUC GODARD Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne-Marie Miéville, 1975) Partially cobbled together from footage Godard shot in 1970 of a Palestinian insurgency, Here and Elsewhere, his first collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, serves as the final nail in the Dziga Vertov Group's coffin, not only because it uses the last of thegroup's material
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE FALL: THE EARLY YEARS (1976-1980) The Fall is my favorite band. The ever-shifting lineup headed by Mancunian gutter prophet-poet Mark E. Smith was post-punk before punk had even flamed out and has, inexplicably, survived 35 years of Smith's brutal, unbearable behavior and an appeal that has only even risen to the level of "cult favorite" at its absolute pinnacle ofpopularity.
NOT JUST MOVIES: KING OF KINGS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1961) Though it begins with the overture and audiovisual bombast expected of a 70mm Biblical epic, King of Kings soon turns into a movie that establishes emotional resonance even as it continues to deliver vast-scale shots of grandeur. Beginning more than 50 years before Christ's birth, Nicholas Ray's film thus dedicates its first images to the sights of Romans sacking Jerusalem, enslaving TELEVISION — MARQUEE MOON I always had a soft spot for Quine that went above and beyond his guitar playing, which I do think is a wholly original and inventive beast as you suggest and the one thing, alongside Hell's songwriting when it's on, that positively makes Blank Generation as consistentlygood as it is.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SOCIAL NETWORK David Fincher's growth as a filmmaker has been both nuanced and startling. His initial pictures are confrontational, reliant upon his experience as a music video director that make pictures like Se7en and Fight Club draining exercises in style. Far from a nihilist, Fincher crafted himself into a deep pessimist who nevertheless fought to findthe good in life.
NOT JUST MOVIES: REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (NICHOLAS RAY, 1955) Nicholas Ray's most enduring and iconic feature, Rebel Without a Cause resonates not only for its portrait of teenage alienation but its complex and warring thoughts on gender and filial roles in society. We meet Jim Stark (James Dean) not as the defiant image of youth we now see outside context but a drunken, morose boy so desperate for a stable vision of family that he curls up on a filthy NOT JUST MOVIES: BLACK BOOK Black Book may be the first Holocaust film to be shot in primary colors. Vibrant reds, blues and yellows fill the screen, and all are present on the heroine, a Jew hiding in plain sight in The Hague with dyed-blond hair, sparkling blue eyes and a dash of red lipstick to drive men so crazy with lust that they couldn't care less about herethnicity.
NOT JUST MOVIES: RANGO When the Rango trailer met with near-unanimous derision and dismissal among critics and, seemingly, audiences, I wonder if Gore Verbinski sat back and knowingly thought to himself, "To hell with it. They'll come crawling back when the time comes." If he did, he was right: Rango wastes no time announcing itself the first major mainstream release of the year, driven by a visual design unseen in NOT JUST MOVIES: WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES (NICHOLAS RAY Wind Across the Everglades marked the beginning of the end for Nicholas Ray. After falling ill during several productions during his career and necessitating shots from other directors, Everglades was the first time Ray's substance abuse problems finally got him fired. NOT JUST MOVIES: BABY FACE (ALFRED E. GREEN, 1933) Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933) There is something indefinite about Barbara Stanwyck's overpowering effect, a subconscious response triggered by an almost imperceptible shift in body language. A lightly cocked eyebrow, a slight repositioning of a leg, all tiny, calculated moves designed for a delayed response to a beauty that, mere momentsNOT JUST MOVIES
But since I do have some sort of life, I decided to write only about my 30 favorite matches. In an attempt to prevent any one performer from dominating the list (looking at you, Chris Hero; be on the lookout for a separate list of his jaw-dropping work this year), I’ve limited the amount of times that a wrestler might appear, especially for matches between the same opponents that may have NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES TV Lists-The 25 Best (and 5 Worst) Angel Episodes-The 10 Best Arrested Development Episodes-The 25 Best (and 5 Worst) Buffy Episodes-My 30 Favorite Mr. Show Sketches -- 30-16 / 15-1-My 20 Favorite T.V. CharactersYear End Lists-Best of 2007-Best of 2008-Best of 2009-Best of 2010-Best of 2011-Worst of 2011-Best of 2012Assorted Film/AlbumLists/Features
NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: FEARLESS (1993)In medium-long
shots of a cornfield framing stalks in the middle plane that obscure the background, a disheveled man appears, shrouded by NOT JUST MOVIES: ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO! (SERGEI EISENSTEIN Que Viva Mexico! marks the first time Sergei Eisenstein truly hit a wall during production, though unlike his later hassles with Stalin's censors, the director here fell prey to financial limitations and impatience of leftist Westerners whose excitement to work with the great Soviet propagandist soon dissolved with their discretionaryfunds.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. NOT JUST MOVIES: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET If Samuel Fuller can hang his legacy on anything, it is his ability to embody contradictions that no normal director could ever reconcile. He could be broader than James Cameron yet as sophisticated a writer as Wilder, a barbarian who seemed to steal a camera and trick a crew into making a movie even as his mise-en-scène communicated layers ofmeaning.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODESBEST EPISODES OF ANGELHOW MANY EPISODES OF ANGELTHE TIME OF ANGELS EPISODE **warning- contains spoilers** Picking the best episodes of "Angel" is even harder than choosing the cream of the crop of its sister show. Even though it boasted some major arcs, it got across a great deal of story and character movement even in its most inconsequential ofepisodes.
NOT JUST MOVIES
But since I do have some sort of life, I decided to write only about my 30 favorite matches. In an attempt to prevent any one performer from dominating the list (looking at you, Chris Hero; be on the lookout for a separate list of his jaw-dropping work this year), I’ve limited the amount of times that a wrestler might appear, especially for matches between the same opponents that may have NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES TV Lists-The 25 Best (and 5 Worst) Angel Episodes-The 10 Best Arrested Development Episodes-The 25 Best (and 5 Worst) Buffy Episodes-My 30 Favorite Mr. Show Sketches -- 30-16 / 15-1-My 20 Favorite T.V. CharactersYear End Lists-Best of 2007-Best of 2008-Best of 2009-Best of 2010-Best of 2011-Worst of 2011-Best of 2012Assorted Film/AlbumLists/Features
NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: FEARLESS (1993)In medium-long
shots of a cornfield framing stalks in the middle plane that obscure the background, a disheveled man appears, shrouded by NOT JUST MOVIES: ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO! (SERGEI EISENSTEIN Que Viva Mexico! marks the first time Sergei Eisenstein truly hit a wall during production, though unlike his later hassles with Stalin's censors, the director here fell prey to financial limitations and impatience of leftist Westerners whose excitement to work with the great Soviet propagandist soon dissolved with their discretionaryfunds.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. NOT JUST MOVIES: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET If Samuel Fuller can hang his legacy on anything, it is his ability to embody contradictions that no normal director could ever reconcile. He could be broader than James Cameron yet as sophisticated a writer as Wilder, a barbarian who seemed to steal a camera and trick a crew into making a movie even as his mise-en-scène communicated layers ofmeaning.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODESBEST EPISODES OF ANGELHOW MANY EPISODES OF ANGELTHE TIME OF ANGELS EPISODE **warning- contains spoilers** Picking the best episodes of "Angel" is even harder than choosing the cream of the crop of its sister show. Even though it boasted some major arcs, it got across a great deal of story and character movement even in its most inconsequential ofepisodes.
NOT JUST MOVIES: HERE AND ELSEWHERE (JEAN-LUC GODARD Partially cobbled together from footage Godard shot in 1970 of a Palestinian insurgency, Here and Elsewhere, his first collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, serves as the final nail in the Dziga Vertov Group's coffin, not only because it uses the last of the group's material but because Godard uses the opportunity to investigate why the group failed. NOT JUST MOVIES: KING OF KINGS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1961) Though it begins with the overture and audiovisual bombast expected of a 70mm Biblical epic, King of Kings soon turns into a movie that establishes emotional resonance even as it continues to deliver vast-scale shots of grandeur. Beginning more than 50 years before Christ's birth, Nicholas Ray's film thus dedicates its first images to the sights of Romans sacking Jerusalem, enslaving TELEVISION — MARQUEE MOON I always had a soft spot for Quine that went above and beyond his guitar playing, which I do think is a wholly original and inventive beast as you suggest and the one thing, alongside Hell's songwriting when it's on, that positively makes Blank Generation as consistentlygood as it is.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SOCIAL NETWORK David Fincher's growth as a filmmaker has been both nuanced and startling. His initial pictures are confrontational, reliant upon his experience as a music video director that make pictures like Se7en and Fight Club draining exercises in style. Far from a nihilist, Fincher crafted himself into a deep pessimist who nevertheless fought to findthe good in life.
NOT JUST MOVIES: BABY FACE (ALFRED E. GREEN, 1933) Just saw this a few weeks ago during the 50 film Pre-Code Festival at Manhattan's Film Forum and of course adored it. It's a real spicy piece, enhanced by the great Stanwyck, and by some outrageous narrative twists, only acceptable until the Hays Code moved in. THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE a few years later was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. NOT JUST MOVIES: REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (NICHOLAS RAY, 1955) Nicholas Ray's most enduring and iconic feature, Rebel Without a Cause resonates not only for its portrait of teenage alienation but its complex and warring thoughts on gender and filial roles in society. We meet Jim Stark (James Dean) not as the defiant image of youth we now see outside context but a drunken, morose boy so desperate for a stable vision of family that he curls up on a filthy NOT JUST MOVIES: WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES (NICHOLAS RAY Wind Across the Everglades marked the beginning of the end for Nicholas Ray. After falling ill during several productions during his career and necessitating shots from other directors, Everglades was the first time Ray's substance abuse problems finally got him fired. NOT JUST MOVIES: BLACK BOOK Black Book may be the first Holocaust film to be shot in primary colors. Vibrant reds, blues and yellows fill the screen, and all are present on the heroine, a Jew hiding in plain sight in The Hague with dyed-blond hair, sparkling blue eyes and a dash of red lipstick to drive men so crazy with lust that they couldn't care less about herethnicity.
NOT JUST MOVIES: RANGO When the Rango trailer met with near-unanimous derision and dismissal among critics and, seemingly, audiences, I wonder if Gore Verbinski sat back and knowingly thought to himself, "To hell with it. They'll come crawling back when the time comes." If he did, he was right: Rango wastes no time announcing itself the first major mainstream release of the year, driven by a visual design unseen in NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LOVE GURU I have seen the end of the universe, and it is a 91-minute dick joke. The Love Guru is so bad, so piercingly unfunny, that I feel almost that I've aged since I watched it. After it ended, I felt a sharp pain in my back and a stiffness in my joints and checked myselfNOT JUST MOVIES
But since I do have some sort of life, I decided to write only about my 30 favorite matches. In an attempt to prevent any one performer from dominating the list (looking at you, Chris Hero; be on the lookout for a separate list of his jaw-dropping work this year), I’ve limited the amount of times that a wrestler might appear, especially for matches between the same opponents that may have NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES TV Lists-The 25 Best (and 5 Worst) Angel Episodes-The 10 Best Arrested Development Episodes-The 25 Best (and 5 Worst) Buffy Episodes-My 30 Favorite Mr. Show Sketches -- 30-16 / 15-1-My 20 Favorite T.V. CharactersYear End Lists-Best of 2007-Best of 2008-Best of 2009-Best of 2010-Best of 2011-Worst of 2011-Best of 2012Assorted Film/AlbumLists/Features
NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: FEARLESS (1993)In medium-long
shots of a cornfield framing stalks in the middle plane that obscure the background, a disheveled man appears, shrouded by NOT JUST MOVIES: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET If Samuel Fuller can hang his legacy on anything, it is his ability to embody contradictions that no normal director could ever reconcile. He could be broader than James Cameron yet as sophisticated a writer as Wilder, a barbarian who seemed to steal a camera and trick a crew into making a movie even as his mise-en-scène communicated layers ofmeaning.
NOT JUST MOVIES: ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO! (SERGEI EISENSTEIN Que Viva Mexico! marks the first time Sergei Eisenstein truly hit a wall during production, though unlike his later hassles with Stalin's censors, the director here fell prey to financial limitations and impatience of leftist Westerners whose excitement to work with the great Soviet propagandist soon dissolved with their discretionaryfunds.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODESBEST EPISODES OF ANGELHOW MANY EPISODES OF ANGELTHE TIME OF ANGELS EPISODE **warning- contains spoilers** Picking the best episodes of "Angel" is even harder than choosing the cream of the crop of its sister show. Even though it boasted some major arcs, it got across a great deal of story and character movement even in its most inconsequential ofepisodes.
NOT JUST MOVIES
But since I do have some sort of life, I decided to write only about my 30 favorite matches. In an attempt to prevent any one performer from dominating the list (looking at you, Chris Hero; be on the lookout for a separate list of his jaw-dropping work this year), I’ve limited the amount of times that a wrestler might appear, especially for matches between the same opponents that may have NOT JUST MOVIES: LISTS/FEATURES TV Lists-The 25 Best (and 5 Worst) Angel Episodes-The 10 Best Arrested Development Episodes-The 25 Best (and 5 Worst) Buffy Episodes-My 30 Favorite Mr. Show Sketches -- 30-16 / 15-1-My 20 Favorite T.V. CharactersYear End Lists-Best of 2007-Best of 2008-Best of 2009-Best of 2010-Best of 2011-Worst of 2011-Best of 2012Assorted Film/AlbumLists/Features
NOT JUST MOVIES: HOT BLOOD (NICHOLAS RAY, 1956) It should be noted up front, however, that Hot Blood does not approach the level of thematic depth of The Savage Innocents.In fact, it boasts the weakest screenplay of any Ray film since A Woman's Secret.Like that film, Hot Blood squanders a potential mindfield of twists and turns, but where Ray and Mankiewicz clearly put a great deal of stock into their lifeless melo-noir, the director here NOT JUST MOVIES: THE HOUSEMAID (1960) NOT JUST MOVIES: FEARLESS (1993)In medium-long
shots of a cornfield framing stalks in the middle plane that obscure the background, a disheveled man appears, shrouded by NOT JUST MOVIES: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET If Samuel Fuller can hang his legacy on anything, it is his ability to embody contradictions that no normal director could ever reconcile. He could be broader than James Cameron yet as sophisticated a writer as Wilder, a barbarian who seemed to steal a camera and trick a crew into making a movie even as his mise-en-scène communicated layers ofmeaning.
NOT JUST MOVIES: ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO! (SERGEI EISENSTEIN Que Viva Mexico! marks the first time Sergei Eisenstein truly hit a wall during production, though unlike his later hassles with Stalin's censors, the director here fell prey to financial limitations and impatience of leftist Westerners whose excitement to work with the great Soviet propagandist soon dissolved with their discretionaryfunds.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1960) Shot partially on location in the Arctic, The Savage Innocents switches the familiar expanse of the West for the bleached tundra of the North. Where the heroes of the West stand as moral individualists, carving out their space in the seeming infinity of the range, the protagonist of the Arctic must fight not for his moral authority butmere survival.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LAST EMPEROR (BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI, 1987) Benardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor offers no sense of comfort for its titular subject.Its present, set in a post-Mao China, is cast in pallid grays, a deathly sense of decay and necrosis emanating from its shots of soldiers lined up to take war criminals off a train and transfer them to an old prison. NOT JUST MOVIES: THE 25 BEST (AND FIVE WORST) ANGEL EPISODESBEST EPISODES OF ANGELHOW MANY EPISODES OF ANGELTHE TIME OF ANGELS EPISODE **warning- contains spoilers** Picking the best episodes of "Angel" is even harder than choosing the cream of the crop of its sister show. Even though it boasted some major arcs, it got across a great deal of story and character movement even in its most inconsequential ofepisodes.
NOT JUST MOVIES: HERE AND ELSEWHERE (JEAN-LUC GODARD Partially cobbled together from footage Godard shot in 1970 of a Palestinian insurgency, Here and Elsewhere, his first collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, serves as the final nail in the Dziga Vertov Group's coffin, not only because it uses the last of the group's material but because Godard uses the opportunity to investigate why the group failed. NOT JUST MOVIES: KING OF KINGS (NICHOLAS RAY, 1961) Though it begins with the overture and audiovisual bombast expected of a 70mm Biblical epic, King of Kings soon turns into a movie that establishes emotional resonance even as it continues to deliver vast-scale shots of grandeur. Beginning more than 50 years before Christ's birth, Nicholas Ray's film thus dedicates its first images to the sights of Romans sacking Jerusalem, enslaving TELEVISION — MARQUEE MOON I always had a soft spot for Quine that went above and beyond his guitar playing, which I do think is a wholly original and inventive beast as you suggest and the one thing, alongside Hell's songwriting when it's on, that positively makes Blank Generation as consistentlygood as it is.
NOT JUST MOVIES: THE SOCIAL NETWORK David Fincher's growth as a filmmaker has been both nuanced and startling. His initial pictures are confrontational, reliant upon his experience as a music video director that make pictures like Se7en and Fight Club draining exercises in style. Far from a nihilist, Fincher crafted himself into a deep pessimist who nevertheless fought to findthe good in life.
NOT JUST MOVIES: BABY FACE (ALFRED E. GREEN, 1933) Just saw this a few weeks ago during the 50 film Pre-Code Festival at Manhattan's Film Forum and of course adored it. It's a real spicy piece, enhanced by the great Stanwyck, and by some outrageous narrative twists, only acceptable until the Hays Code moved in. THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE a few years later was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. NOT JUST MOVIES: REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (NICHOLAS RAY, 1955) Nicholas Ray's most enduring and iconic feature, Rebel Without a Cause resonates not only for its portrait of teenage alienation but its complex and warring thoughts on gender and filial roles in society. We meet Jim Stark (James Dean) not as the defiant image of youth we now see outside context but a drunken, morose boy so desperate for a stable vision of family that he curls up on a filthy NOT JUST MOVIES: WIND ACROSS THE EVERGLADES (NICHOLAS RAY Wind Across the Everglades marked the beginning of the end for Nicholas Ray. After falling ill during several productions during his career and necessitating shots from other directors, Everglades was the first time Ray's substance abuse problems finally got him fired. NOT JUST MOVIES: BLACK BOOK Black Book may be the first Holocaust film to be shot in primary colors. Vibrant reds, blues and yellows fill the screen, and all are present on the heroine, a Jew hiding in plain sight in The Hague with dyed-blond hair, sparkling blue eyes and a dash of red lipstick to drive men so crazy with lust that they couldn't care less about herethnicity.
NOT JUST MOVIES: RANGO When the Rango trailer met with near-unanimous derision and dismissal among critics and, seemingly, audiences, I wonder if Gore Verbinski sat back and knowingly thought to himself, "To hell with it. They'll come crawling back when the time comes." If he did, he was right: Rango wastes no time announcing itself the first major mainstream release of the year, driven by a visual design unseen in NOT JUST MOVIES: THE LOVE GURU I have seen the end of the universe, and it is a 91-minute dick joke. The Love Guru is so bad, so piercingly unfunny, that I feel almost that I've aged since I watched it. After it ended, I felt a sharp pain in my back and a stiffness in my joints and checked myselfNOT JUST MOVIES
Personal blog of freelance critic Jake Cole, with exclusive content and links to writing around the Web.PAGES
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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2018LINKS
So it should be obvious from a cursory look that this site isn't really updated anymore but I am still writing around the internet so here are links to my work to keep up with my reviews My writing for Slant Magazine My writing for Spectrum Culture My Letterboxd page , which for all intents and purposes will likely replace this as my place for casualreviews
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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2016 THE BEST WRESTLING MATCHES OF 2016 (15-1) Continuing from yesterday's post, read on as I count down my favorite wrestling matches of the year. 15. Kazuchika Okada (c) vs. Naomichi Marufuji IWGP Heavyweight Championship, NJPW, King of Pro Wrestling, 10/10****¾
Pro Wrestling NOAH was in bad need of a shake-up when it was sold this fall, but the unfortunate side effect of their transfer of ownership was the sudden termination of a buddying invasion storyline with NJPW that had all the potential to boost both companies. As is, this match, a rematch of the pair’s great outing in the G1 tournament, stands as the final word on the aborted crossover. But if that is the case, at least the match itself is great, with Marufuji absolutely demolishing Okada and forcing New Japan’s ace to work as underdog the entire time. Okada takes wild bumps from his opponent, including a piledriver on the apron and a return to the ring to eat a dropkick, that make Marufuji look better in a single match than he has years in NOAH. The energy of this match never flags, even when Okada takes control and slows it down to recover, and in some respects his willingness to bump wildly for another promotion’s talent is a better show of ace-like qualities than his matches with Tanahashi.Read more »
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FRIDAY, DECEMBER 30, 2016 THE BEST WRESTLING MATCHES OF 2016 (30-16) When I posted a list of my favorite wrestling matches of the year last December, I had only just gotten into wrestling, converted rapidly by the excellence of NXT’s women’s division and my introduction to New Japan Pro Wrestling. That budding interest exploded in 2016, which was a horrible year in nearly every respect save one: the worldwide quality of wrestling seemed to skyrocket. Even those who’d followed it all their lives said 2016 was special, and new avenues of access to smaller promotions made it easier than ever to keep track of wrestlers all over the globe. Even limiting myself to hyped matches from indies and smaller international companies, I still managed to watch more than 350 matches this year, an outlandish number of which were so good that when I thought about my favorite matches of the year I could rattle off about 70. But since I do have some sort of life, I decided to write only about my 30 favorite matches. In an attempt to prevent any one performer from dominating the list (looking at you, Chris Hero; be on the lookout for a separate list of his jaw-dropping work this year), I’ve limited the amount of times that a wrestler might appear, especially for matches between the same opponents that may have resulting in multiple year-end contenders. Despite this selective editing, though, everything on this list was as thrilling, innovative, and impactful as what was cut, and the result is that in a list of 30 matches, 15 promotions are showcased. Read on for what can only be a brief overview of one of the greatest years for in-ring action ever.Read more »
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SATURDAY, DECEMBER 24, 2016 THE UNLIKELY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF PRINCE’S ‘UNDER THE CHERRY MOON’ AND ‘GRAFFITI BRIDGE’Hello all,
I don't use this blog much anymore, if that wasn't obvious, but I keep meaning to perma-post links to my published bylines and will do that soon. In the meantime, though, I am excited to share a link to a piece I had posted at Musings on Prince's neglected films _Under the Cherry Moon_ and _Graffiti Bridge_, both of which are goofy, indulgent, but also revealing of aspects of Prince's personality and artistry. Now more than ever, they are crucial pieces to his puzzle. You may read myfull article
here: http://musings.oscilloscope.net/post/154212251546/the-unlikely-autobiography-of-princes-under-the Posted by Jake Cole 9 commentsEmail This
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THURSDAY, JANUARY 7, 2016WRESTLE KINGDOM 10
New Japan Pro Wrestling yet again throws down the gauntlet for the year with a top flight PPV that boasts a great card and even better work. No use beating around the bush, here are breakdowns and ratings for the event. (WARNING: contains spoilers. I would highly recommend you track down this event, or at least the final three matches, immediately if you have yet to watch them.)Read more »
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wrestling
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2015 MY YEAR IN PRO WRESTLING It’s weird to get into pro wrestling when you’re 26 as opposed to, say, just 6. I remember being about that age when Hulk Hogan was attempting to break out of wrestling and into movies, and my earliest exposure to wrestling was by way of god-awful Blockbuster shelf-fillers like Suburban Commando and Mr. Nanny. Yet the bizarre tendency for a cluster of cinephiles on Twitter to turn into wrestling freaks every Monday finally made me curious enough to sample some shows, and I was alarmed at how fast I got into it, especially considering how little attention I give to (real) sports. But maybe the fact that wrestling is fake is precisely what draws me to it. I get no pleasure out of legitimate fights in which people pummel each other into early-onset Alzheimer’s, but I’m very taken with one of the earliest sentences in Bret Hart’s memoir Hitman, where he writes “To me there is something beautiful about a brotherhood of big, tough men who only pretend to hurt one another for a living instead of actually doing it.” That says it all to me: I am thrilled by the notion of highly trained athletes putting on a show that stresses entertainment, putting their bodies on the line while doing their best not to harm the other guy. There’s something kind of poetic in that, and I’ve quickly come to believe that the best wrestling is poetry, capable of silent storytelling with the in-ring continuity of storyline rivalries, injuries both real and faked, and a mixture of careful spot planning and split-second improvisation. Speaking of Hart, he became my immediate favorite as I began trawling through classics on the WWE Network. His promos were stiff, but his in-ring work spoke more than he ever could on a mic, and no matter who I saw him paired with, he always adapted to their style and made them look as good as they ever did by selling each blow with finesse and showcasing an elaborate series of submission holds, counters and grapples that are a far cry from the finisher-heavy setup of the modern WWE matches I’ve seen. I love how many of his matches were decided by flash moments of quick thinking, like the kick-off from the corner into a roll-up pin that ends his Survivor Series bout with Steve Austin, or the back-and-forth holds in his Wrestlemania X match with brother Owen. I’ve had to venture into Japanese wrestling to see the same kind of ring intelligence today that Hart showedregularly.
Running through a swift redux of the various eras of WWE, I got a more complete picture of the ebb and flow of the company’s push-pull between giants and smaller, savvier technicians; how great commentary can turn a simple fight into a contest of immortals (will WWE ever find another JR?); how the Attitude Era is both much worse and as good as its legend. I ran through the highlights of Daniel Bryan’s hard-won fight to Wrestlemania XXX and marveled at how many great matches Undertaker put on at the big show year after year, especially those justifiably legendary Shawn Michaels bouts. I even dug into the company’s amusingly arrogant documentaries on the ratings war with WCW, a series of self-fellating tributes to Vince McMahon’s genius that nonetheless offered a decent primer on how wrestling went from the edge of obsolescence to its greatest pop cultural heyday. When I moved into this year’s programming, however, I realized it was a bad year to leap into WWE. Injuries sidelined many of the best wrestlers (a running theme even in other promotions), and months without Daniel Bryan, Seth Rollins and Sami Zayn showed how poorly the creative team had built the rest of the roster as a fallback. Though the company has one of the strongest rosters ever, and technical ability has never been more readily on display, the company’s main programs were typically abysmal, filled with plotlines that grew stale even for this total neophyte and matches that failed to capitalize on the performers’ abilities and instead featured sloppy brawls and repetitive pairings. Worst of all was the total flop of the “Divas Revolution,” in which an extremely talented roster of female wrestlers got reduced to amateurish match plotting, directionless narratives and an over-reliance on teams to ensure the maximum amount of t&a was on-screen. But if WWE’s main program was a shitshow, the explosion of talent on their developmental NXT show made this a great year to try out wrestling. NXT did everything Raw didn’t: it told simple, coherent stories that both new and long-time fans could follow and appreciate, and it foregrounded the wrestling itself with performers who had exceptional ring skills. It’s almost laughable to even think of this show as WWE’s testing ground, as the talent on display and the freedom afforded to that talent made even the average weekly filler better than all but the most focused Raw episodes. Picking out favorite wrestlers was impossible. The Vaudevillains tag team were a hilarious, instantly lovable gimmick; Tyler Breeze took the most obnoxiously “topical” character since World’s Strongest Vegan Daniel Bryan and did as much with it as Bryan did his role; Apollo Crews was like a Goldberg who could actually wrestle, maybe incapable of performing a long-term match but so nimble and risky that you can’t help but pop when he comes out; and Samoa Joe looked so strong and on-form that I couldn’t believe he’d been around for forever. And that’s not taking into account the greatest aspect of all, how their women’s division did everything right that the Divas roster did wrong, spotlighting the fact that women could be as good in the ring as men. It’s been a shame to see the matches here compared to the way that people like Paige, Charlotte and Sasha Banks have fared on the main roster, and one can only hope that NXT’s rapturous 2015 reception might trigger at least some changes on Raw, which frankly has to do something to stanch the bleeding of its dwindlingviewership.
But NXT wasn’t the only pleasure to be had. I dipped a toe into NJPW and loved what I saw, wrestling built less on big spots than methodical grapples, stiff blows and ring psychology, so good that I didn’t need to speak Japanese to follow every detail. It’s everything I love about wrestling, and if this was apparently a tepid year for the promotion, then I can’t wait to explore it further and see how good it is when firing on all cylinders. I was also surprised to discover that WWE mounted one great long-form narrative around the unlikeliest of stories: the Fall and Rise of Roman Reigns. Reigns became one of the most hated men in the company at the top of the year when WWE boosted him over Daniel Bryan in two straight PPVs, only for creative to ingeniously win over fans by screwing Reigns for the better part of a year, making his snap at the recent TLC event and subsequent title win the next night feel hard-won rather than gifted on a silver platter. It was a demonstration of how great the company can be when it bothers to pay attention, and I hope the momentumcarries into 2016.
It’s hard to talk about wrestling in broad strokes without a focus on the individual matches that best exemplify it, so perhaps I can better explain what made me an instant fan by talking about my favorite matches of the year. With the caveat that I’ve had little exposure to smaller and independent promotions, my top 10 is asfollows:
10. BAYLEY VS. SASHA BANKS (NXT TAKEOVER: RESPECT) 30-MINUTE IRON MAN MATCH FOR THE NXT WOMEN’S CHAMPIONSHIP, OCTOBER7, 2015
I have to say I’m not much of a fan of the Iron Man format. Plenty of one-fall bouts can go a half-hour to 45 minutes and maintain a sense of suspense and drama that the telegraphed, timed back-and-forth of an Iron Man negates. (To be honest, I’m not even as wild about the Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels Iron Man as I am for their other pairings, though each performer’s technical fundamentals makes it the best sold and best told of these gimmicks I’ve seen). But for two women to main event a special and to do so with a format built around the need for endurance and adaptability is such a major event for WWE, not to mention the special chemistry Bayley and Banks have. Everyone will remember Banks going full heel by smashing Bayley onto the screen then taunting Bayley’s biggest kid fan, Izzy, by straight up stealing her headband and prancing around as a laid-out champ was counted out. But it’s no less compelling that good-natured hugger Bayley herself snapped and applied some devious moves, viciously attacking Sasha’s hand to negate her opponent’s crossface wristlock in an echo of Sasha’s moves at Takeover: Brooklyn. The finale was a bit too obvious, but the effort throughout, building from their feud without simply duplicating prior highlights. But it was when the match had ended and the roster filed out to pay their respects to this historic moment, with not only the two competitors but even vets like William Regal openly shedding tears for what it all meant, that this became truly transcendent. 9. HARASHIMA & KEN OHKA VS. HIROSHI TANAHASHI & YOHEI KOMATSU (DDTMUSCLE MATES)
_INTER-PROMOTIONAL TAG TEAM MATCH, NOVEMBER 17, 2015_ I love Hiroshi Tanahashi. Even a barely exposed mark like me can tell he isn’t the best wrestler in NJPW, and both heir apparent Kazuchika Okada and Coolest Man Alive Shinsuke Nakamura have better ring adaptability and bigger move-sets. But if Tanahashi is the Cena of Japan, he’s also far more versatile in both his moves and his image, a top face who is more than willing to play the heel depending on what he reads from a crowd. He goes full heel in NJPW’s crossover event with independent promotion DDT, having set things in motion by complaining in a preceding press conference of having to take time out of being the biggest star in Japan to help out some rinky-dink indie outfit. So when he shows up for this match, he’s greeted with boos so loud it’s hard to believe they can come from so modest a crowd, and every single time DDT’s HARASHIMA and Ken Ohka gets a hit on either Tanahashi or NJPW scrub Yohei Komatsu, the pops are deafening. Tag matches are all formulaic, but this one benefits from a lack of complicating factors; Tanahashi does his best work at ringside, letting Komatsu deal with whomever is tagged in while taking the other person out into the crowd for an up close and personal brawl. But even this keeps things simple, pitting nasty big-timers against underdogs small fries who withstand the beatings and make well-timed attacks on revealed weaknesses. One thing I like about Japanese style wrestling is how much everyone trusts an audience to be as wowed by well-executed, passionately delivered basic attacks as they would be by big spots, and it’s great to see forearms and slaps get such big reactions thanks to good storytelling behind it. I’m also exceptionally fond of the literal, honest-to-God Power Point presentation that Tanahashi gives after the match in which he manages to go step by step through his love of wrestling and manage to get the crowd on his side while talking all about himself by conveying his deep respect for the sport and thus for DDT and his competitors. It’s both a dorky showing even by the standards of the air guitar-wielding icon and a sweet, shoot acknowledgment of the respect and passion that unites wrestlers regardless of their exposure andfame.
8. RODERICK STRONG VS. ZACK SABRE, JR. (PWG DON’T SWEAT THE TECHNIQUE) _SINGLES MATCH FOR THE PWG CHAMPIONSHIP, APRIL 3, 2015_ Someone recommended this to me since I expressed an interest in technical wrestling and I was utterly blown away. Strong makes an immediate impression as a solid wrestler with great ring awareness, but Sabre just embarrasses him at times with a textbook command of holds and counters that he wields with fluid grace, forever slipping out of Strong’s rougher attacks and locking up arm into grips that sent limbs at perilously stretched angles. This is wrestling at its purest, so focused on technique that even when the action spills onto the apron or the floor, it immediately gets back in the ring. God bless the exceptionally strong commentary for naming even the moves executed for a split second, as well as for sudden digressions into elaborate poetry, such as an extended comparison of limb targeting to bank deposits, resulting in the greatest ringside line I heard this year: “As the great economist Adam Smith said, ‘There is no greater force in the universe than compound interest,’ and Zack Sabre Jr. is making some wise investments in the early moments of this match.” I loved the back-and-forth of the match, how Sabre’s effortless escapes and reversals got Strong more and more pissed, until he finally snaps and just starts stomping the poor kid’s face. It’s such a simple end compared to how all the other matches on this list end, but it felt just as powerful as a WWE PPV closer for how precisely it tied up a nifty bit of psychology. Sabre is heavily tipped to join NXT next year; on this strength of this match alone, it’s maybe the wrestling event I most want to see in 2016. 7. HIROSHI TANAHASHI VS. SHINSUKE NAKAMURA (G1 CLIMAX) _G1 CLIMAX FINAL, AUGUST 16, 2015_ I didn’t quite know what to make of this match at first, because it was the first Japanese match I watched. The slow pace was confusing to someone who was still watching American PPV classics as an introduction and thus thought of great matches as blow-outs, but as I got more into methodical wrestling, I came to see why everyone’s favorite wrestling geek, Dave Meltzer, gave it five stars. The steady build shows smart psychology from both men, with Tanahashi targeting Nakamura’s legitimate elbow injury as well as going after the leg his opponent uses for his running knee Boma Ye finisher, while Nakamura works over Tanahashi’s arm to set up his armbar submission. The careful establishment of these attacks may not be much to see at first, but it pays off when the opponents suddenly, exhilaratingly kick into high gear, so that when Nakamura rolls out of the way of Tanahashi’s High Fly Flow splash and pops up into a Boma Ye, he executes it at half-strength and immediately lays out in agony as he grips his weakened leg, in too much pain to go for a pin. One thing I’ve heard about Japanese wrestling (and very much like) is that finishers are still treated as such, meaning that it means something for someone to actually withstand one and come back for more. Thus, when both fighters rally their strength and start launching power moves at one another, you can feel the crowd go electric when each wrestler manages to get out of a pin or a hold because this doesn’t happen four times a week like it does on Raw. So when Tanahashi hits a High Fly Flow and then goes up and hits another before the pin, the crowd reaction when Nakamura kicks out at two-and-three-quarters is monumental and venue-trembling, equal to the crazed reactions of Taker/Michaels at Wrestlemania 25. Some have complained that Tanahashi wins and thus gets to main event his umpteenth Wrestle Kingdom while Nakamura settles for second best (or third, given the likelihood of Tanahashi passing the torch to Kazuchika Okada on January 4. But no one who takes the punishment he does here walks out a loser, and the finale of the two men battling it out on the top turnbuckle as Nakamura can only delay the inevitable splashes coming his way is as good as wrestling gets. 6. JAY LETHAL VS. A.J. STYLES (ROH FINAL BATTLE) ROH WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH, DECEMBER 18, 2015 A.J. Styles has had an up and down two years, hitting NJPW like a bomb in 2014 and immediately tossing out MOTY contenders, but also breaking two wrestlers’ necks with his Styles Clash finisher before closing out 2015 with a back injury of his own that has fans nervous about his future. Yet he wrestled his best match of the year on that injury, against Ring of Honor champ Lethal at the promotion’s marquee event. Lethal naturally targets A.J.’s back to build heat, and even simple bear hug grapples can make you wince when you wonder about the real impact. But Styles gives as good as he gets, and the two put on an epic show that mixes mat-clinic reversals with free-form big spots. A sequence where each wrestler performs a series of reversals into sick powerbombs, neckbreakers and suplexes is an early highlight, while things get manic around the time Lethal lands two suicide dives, sends Styles into the crowd, only to go for a third in time for Styles to come to and springboard from a barricade to meet a diving Lethal with an elbow to the face. Add a table crash so harrowing that the fact it’s almost entirely off-camera detracts nothing from its power for good measure, and you’ve got an instantclassic.
5. (TIE) BROCK LESNAR VS. JOHN CENA VS. SETH ROLLINS (ROYAL RUMBLE) TRIPLE THREAT MATCH FOR THE WWE WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP,JANUARY 25, 2015
BROCK LESNAR VS. ROMAN REIGNS (WRESTLEMANIA 31) WWE WORLD HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP MATCH, MARCH 29, 2015 These are two matches with two entirely different narrative aims that are linked by a core notion: the terrifying indestructibility of Brock Lesnar. For someone who originally left WWE in the most ignominious fashion, leaving a farce of a farewell match to a chorus of boos, Lesnar has received such massive reactions since his return it’s hard to imagine he ever left at all, and he had an incredible year in 2015. After the sluggish, concussed match that ended Undertaker’s Streak, Lesnar and Taker rebounded with two solid, strong showings at Summerslam and Hell in a Cell, but it was these two early matches that really set the standard for the Beast Incarnate. Both the Royal Rumble Triple Threat and the Wrestlemania singles bout are examples of WWE taking its weaknesses with patient building and finisher over-reliance and turned them into comic masterpieces. Cena actually got out there and wrestled a bit this year (his Elimination Chamber match with Kevin Owens is the #11 match on this top 10 list, not just for Owens’s versatility and psychology but for Cena actually rolling with it), and he showed from time to time he could actually do more than just perform his Five Moves of Doom and withstand anything. The Royal Rumble is not such a match; in it, Lesnar and Cena hit so many finishers that they resemble a WWE video game where someone tweaked the settings for endless power moves. All the showstoppers and kick outs become a joke rendition of the platonic ideal WWE PPV, yet the absurdity tells a great story of Cena’s tenacity, Lesnar’s invincibility and Rollins’s intelligence and strategy. When Cena hit three AA’s in a row on Lesnar and the latter stands up from each one like it’s nothing, Cena’s finisher doesn’t look fake and weak, Lesnar looks like Hercules. When Rollins lets the two muscleheads weaken each other before targeting them with high-flying moves that unsettle their balance, he looks less like a chickenshit, Authority-backed yes man than a brilliantly conniving mastermind. The match juggles several balls, giving Lesnar a dominant win while still pointing out that a god can bleed, letting Cena look strong without the usual CENAWINSLOL ridiculousness, and setting up Rollins’s intelligence... ...which leads to the Wrestlemania 31 conclusion. After the unmitigated disaster of Reigns’s Road to Wrestlemania, who could have expected that WWE would use the main event itself to set in motion a course correction? After building Reigns too fast, the company caught wise and actually adapted to an audience response instead of just forging ahead stupidly as they did for every other 2015 storyline. Reigns comes into Levi’s Stadium not even as a heel, just a man the fans resolutely do not want, and the “pace” of the match’s beginning, where Lesnar just puts the hurt on the company’s golden boy for an extended period of time to the delight of the crowd, is a testament to their feelings. This isn’t a spotlight for Reigns, it’s a bloodbath, but one where his refusal to stay down becomes less a show of strength than of duty, and his foolhardy resilience speaks better of him than his erstwhiledomination.
When Reigns finally rallies and catches Lesnar off-guard, his look of amazement at his own achievement in briefly staggering the Beast is the best acting Reigns has ever done. Then there’s the truly impressive trigonometry of the finale, which cogently maps out a way for Reigns to be humbled without completely killing his momentum, for Lesnar to lose in a believable way, and for Rollins to come in and pull a craven, calculating move that only makes people appreciate the genius of it. Absolutely nothing WWE creative wrote for their main roster this year came close to this level of thoughtfulness, and even if Rollins’ extended medical leave threatened the perfection of this setup, it was so strong that by the end of the year they’d managed to get Reigns over for real, seemingly an impossible feat going intothis match.
4. MIL MUERTES VS. FENIX (LUCHA UNDERGROUND GRAVE CONSEQUENCES) CASKET MATCH, MARCH 18, 2015 Less a wrestling match than a public showcase of attempted murder, this terrifying Lucha Underground showdown takes the limited concept of a casket match and makes it feel like life is truly on the line. Mil Muertes is a man possessed, busting open Fenix’s head after unscrewing a bottom rope (you can do that?) and belting him with the metal clip, then going right ahead and biting at the man’s open wound for extra effect. Throughout, both performers show an awareness of the psychology of a casket match that I haven’t even seen in the Taker casket matches I’ve watched. Neither man, least of all Muertes, goes for the casket for forever, because the point is not simply to trap your opponent for a win but to roll a proper corpse into their final resting place. The action spills everywhere, into a crowd that scatters to avoid the blood, onto a balcony for perilous near-throws, and all around a ring that gets more and more trashed. The best move happens surprisingly early, when Fenix gets a second wind and goes for a suicide dive through the ropes at Muertes, only for Muertes to whip the casket up to catch his opponent full in the face, leaving a sickening dent in the lid so deep it’s a miracle that Fenix’s head didn’t punch all the way through. 3. HIROSHI TANAHASHI VS. KAZUCHIKA OKADA (WRESTLE KINGDOM 9) _SINGLES MATCH FOR THE IWGP HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPIONSHIP, JANUARY 4, 2015_ Wrestling in 2015 arguably peaked four days into the year at NJPW’s Wrestle Kingdom 9, an event with such a great card that even this masterpiece of a main event is not even the best match of the night. In fact, the first segment of this fight seems to be an extended cooldown of its showstopping predecessor, with both wrestlers exchanging holds and scouting each other to bring down the energy and to focus the crowd on what limbs are being targeted and what moves being set up. Both of the closing matches of the event set up a conflict between a dominant belt-holder and a long-struggling challenger who for various reasons, finally snaps and goes for the jugular. Okada sets things into motion properly by spoiling a clean break with a forearm before launching attacks that send the champion ringside, and from there he goes to town with a flurry of moves, including a hangman DDT on a guardrail that could make Randy Ortonblush.
Okada’s energy is infectious, but unfortunately for him, Tanahashi catches it and begins to battle back with equal tenacity, including a signature out on the ramp. But more importantly, the champion, that goofy icon with the big hair and the air guitar, starts to show flashes of annoyance, then desperation as Okada repeatedly breaks through defenses and neutralizes Tanahashi’s assaults before he can get momentum. You can start to see the champion play a little dirty and hit a little harder to gain the upper hand. Then comes a downright insane move, where Tanahashi sends Okada over a guardrail, runs back into the ring and mounts the corner turnbuckle, and proceeds to hit a flying body press over the barricade and perfectly onto the challenger. In actuality the dive is probably “only” 20 feet or so, but when the camera throws out to a long shot of Okada crushed at the very edge of frame, behind the steel rail, as Tanahashi coils his legs, the distance between the two looks twice as long. And when Tanahashi hits the move flawlessly, you can feel the entire stadium rock with unleashed awe. The match is so epic that even Okada’s Rainmaker finisher, a move so protected that no one has kicked out after receiving it, is not enough to keep Tanahashi down and stop the fight. (The only criticism you can levy at this match is that the wrestlers get back into things just a few seconds too soon after this momentous moment, but the crowd’s shock makes up for this miniscule miscalculation.) Tanahashi ingeniously manages to make this kick-out itself a vaguely meta heel turn, as if he legitimately refused to stay down and play ball just so he could teach this upstart a few more lessons. The post-match ridiculousness, with Tanahashi taking the mic to berate a crying Okada, is obvious set up for the aging Tanahashi to start fully passing the torch to Okada, maybe even at the Tokyo Dome show next week, but who wins this match, or the upcoming one, is irrelevant in the face of such entertainment. 2. SHINSUKE NAKAMURA VS. KOTA IBUSHI (WRESTLE KINGDOM 9) SINGLES MATCH FOR THE IWGP INTERCONTINENTAL CHAMPIONSHIP No other contemporary wrestler I watched this year entertained me as much as Shinsuke Nakamura. Daniel Bryan was an early favorite as I hustled through his arc against the Authority as well has the general quality of his wrestling in both WWE and his early ROH/Dragon Gate days, but a combination of terrible booking and potentially career-ending injury made his 2015 an unmitigated disaster and took some of the fun out of marking for him. But even if Bryan had a great year, it’s hard to imagine I still wouldn’t put Nakamura at the top. He is maybe my ideal wrestler, he cuts every bit the iconic profile of a heavy-hitter, with that leather get-up, his tendency to dance along to his own entrance music, and that to-the-rafters facial acting that sells everything from brash charisma to howling pain at the perfect balance between just enough and too much. The Wrestle Kingdom Intercontinental match is the perfect showcase for Nakamura; even more than the Tanahashi bout later in the year, it allows him to deftly mix his “strong style” martial arts knowledge with his ring awareness. The G1 Final with Tanahashi is a meeting of two powerhouses, each scoping out the other, testing for weaknesses, then plowing ahead with everything. But Nakamura responds equally as well to Ibushi’s agility and high-flying antics, working to slow the pace to prevent his momentum from getting out of hand but also busting fast and furious attacks of his own, as in a stretch early on where he hits different knee attacks in the corner, on the apron and at ringside in a matter of seconds. It becomes downright hard to watch at times toward the end, when both men look like they’ve just thrown technique out the window in favor of beating the holy hell of theother guy.
Aiding the verve and passion of the wrestling is the focus of the story on display, of Nakamura, ever the bridesmaid for Tanahashi, belligerently holding onto the Intercontinental title as both proof of his worthiness and his chance to go after the top title. Ibushi, meanwhile, is the mid-carder who sees his chance to rise up by defeating the #2 guy, and a 2014 sidelined by injuries has made this a make-or-break match to get his name back into the conversation. Watching him steal Nakamura’s moves and mimic his expressions bypasses language barrier, and the elaborate move-set he employs is used with ferocious abandon. (Just watch him hit a brutal double stomp on Nakamura to send him out onto the apron, at which point Ibushi executes a dragon suplex from the second rope to hurl him back into the ring.) Ibushi was one of a horrifyingly long list of wrestlers who suffered major injuries in 2015, so this may be his last hurrah. But he damn sure left this match a star; Nakamura proves in this fight that he can do anything, but Ibushi proves he’s the man who will make him do absolutely everything to win. 1. SASHA BANKS VS. BAYLEY (NXT TAKEOVER: BROOKLYN) SINGLES MATCH FOR THE NXT WOMEN’S CHAMPIONSHIP, AUGUST, 22, 2015 When I watched the Wrestlemania 13 main event between Bret Hart and Stone Cold Steve Austin, I felt like I was getting an education into the potential of great wrestling. Every single aspect of the match is perfect. Both performers are at the top of their game, and their minimal pre-show planning is actually a boon, as every single move has the feel of being fresh because most of it is improvised. Hart gets the win, but it’s Austin who emerges the victor, bravely refusing to tap out to the Hitman’s Sharpshooter hold while bleeding profusely from the forehead, passing out rather than give up. The commentary from Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler hones in on the details of each move to explain the complexity of the back-and-forth, but more importantly it subtly builds a narrative that shifts sympathy and reverence away from longtime babyface champion Hart onto the brash, antiheroic rising star Austin. Every single piece fits perfectly, to the point that it is not only a five-star classic piece of work but the mark of a major shift in WWE creative, away from its struggling transitional era into itsAttitude phase.
That match came to mind watching Bayley face off against reigning NXT Women’s Champion Sasha Banks, not only because of, barring a few early botches, the quality of the wrestling but because it felt like a sea change for a company that has a horrid track record with women. This match isn’t nearly as technically proficient as the two Wrestle Kingdom showcases just before it on this list; the early stretch features one too many botches, however minor. But no other story in 2015 wrestling was as vital. The in-ring personality clash was a testament to how simplicity and clarity can be infinitely more sophisticated than needless complication; the Divas roster is constantly being reshuffled in heel turns that come and go on a weekly basis, but there is focus and consistency in keeping Bayley as a plucky, kind-hearted underdog and Banks as a vicious heel whose aggression masks a vulnerability that powers her most desperate andarrogant outbursts.
NXT’s commentary isn’t exactly amazing, but I’ll gladly take its directness and consistency to whatever the hell Raw’s haphazard use of JBL, Michael Cole and Jerry Lawler is. The announcers call clear attention to Bayley’s freshly healed broken wrist, a concise setup for the grisly, uncomfortable focus Banks puts on Bayley’s hand, as if she wants nothing more than to break it again. Divas matches, even to this newbie, fall into an easy patterns that set up submissions or roll-ups to end things after a few minutes. But Bayley and Sasha go to war, and even Bayley, who maintains her face image throughout, looks like she might truly put Sasha Banks into an early retirement. Bayley’s dropkick through the corner, Sasha’s brutal Bank Statement hold that Bayley miraculously reverses, and that top-rope inverted hurricanrana that brings things to a close are great moves on their face but are even more powerful as shows of intense effort. When Sasha cries at the end as Bayley stands victorious, it isn’t because she lost, it’s because she understands that she’s been a part of something truly major, and even if she and three-quarters of the Four Horsewomen have been utterly wasted on Raw since, it’s clear from this match that WWE can no longer afford to dismiss its women as eye-candy filler. Of course, WWE will almost certainly do so anyway, but if only for a night, these competitors made women’s wrestling the greatest thing in the entire world. Posted by Jake Cole 28 commentsEmail This
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TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2014 TIFF14/NYFF ROUND-UP Here are links to my TIFF coverage from earlier this year, plus some reviews of films I saw in Toronto but pitched as NYFF reviews. TIFF Review: A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence TIFF Review: Horse Money TIFF Review: Goodbye to Language 3DNYFF Review: Jauja
NYFF Review: PasoliniCapsules:
Eden, Rosewater & Jauja Pasolini, Tales & Don't Go Breaking My Heart 2 Phoenix, Tokyo Tribe & Hill of Freedom Posted by Jake Cole 7 commentsEmail This
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