Asking the Wrong Questions

It's hard to imagine two films that are more different than Upstream Color and Gravity , but in one sense at least they ping me the same way--they both seem like films about which it would be a waste of time to try to write a conventional review.  Or at least, the way I write reviews, focusing on plot, character, and theme.  Like Upstream Color , Gravity is a film whose power lies elsewhere, in its visuals and design, and in the way it reaches directly for emotions like fear and anxiety.  That's not to say that there haven't been interesting reviews of the film (I'm fond of this one , by Wai Chee Dimock at The Los Angeles Review of Books ), but as I did with Upstream Color , it seems to make more sense to gather my stray observations about the film rather than write a proper review. Watching the film, I was reminded of an essay I read in 2009, by a reviewer who was trying to explain away negative reactions to James Cameron's Avatar by, essentially, claiming th...

People my age, I think, can for the most part be divided into two groups--those whose first encounter with William Shakespeare the playwright (as opposed to William Shakespeare the cultural icon and creator of such linguistic commonplaces as "To be or not to be") came from Baz Luhrman's 1996 Romeo + Juliet , and those for whom it was Kenneth Branagh's 1993 Much Ado About Nothing .  I'm in the latter group, and--all due respect to Luhrman--I can't imagine a better introduction.  Branagh's sun-dappled, cheerful film, in which he and his then-wife Emma Thompson headline as the argumentative lovers Benedick and Beatrice, is not only a top-notch adaptation of an excellent play, but it has a lightness and an effortlessness that cut through a young person's (or even a not-so-young person's) conception of Shakespeare as serious or difficult.  It's full of song and dance and beautiful scenery which, far from distracting from the archaic language, only e...

By most yardsticks, I suppose, this year's fall pilot season isn't much worse than previous years.  But it is much more boring .  For every show I've written about this year, there are two or three about which I had nothing to say that I haven't said a million times before--unoriginal plots, underdeveloped characters, blandly beautiful leads, indifferent procedural stories, poorly defined antagonists.  In short, boring shows hardly worth talking about.  The below are the few exceptions--though hardly innocent, the lot of them, of the sin of unoriginality.  (Progress report on previously-discussed shows: Brooklyn Nine-Nine remains funny, SHIELD remains a show that I wouldn't be watching if it weren't for its pedigree, I gave up on Hostages after the second episode, and Peaky Blinders is a lot of fun even as its story becomes more predictable.) Sleepy Hollow - Every year, it seems, there's a new cheesy genre show for fandom to get bemusedly enthusiasti...

The most shocking moment in Breaking Bad 's final episode, "Felina," happens in its teaser.  Having spent months holed up in rural New Hampshire as his body finally succumbs to cancer, fed only by scraps of news about his family's (mostly ill) fortune in the wake of his exposure as the meth manufacturer Heisenberg, Walter White is headed back to Albequerque.  Slipping into an unlocked car, he frantically and ineffectually scrapes at the ignition with a screwdriver.  As the lights of an approaching police car begin to illuminate the car's interior, Walt--sick, tired, and cold--leans back in despair, and then speaks.  "Just get me home," he rasps.  "Just get me home.  I'll do the rest."  With less than an hour left in his show (and only a few days left in his life), Walter White is praying. At the most basic level, this is shocking because Walt has never been presented as a person who thinks about spiritual matters, much less the existence ...

Well, here we are again.  With almost no time to grow accustomed to the glut, the new fall shows are here, and even omitting a huge number of them simply because there's really nothing to say, I've had to split the discussion of already-aired shows into two parts, with more to come.  I wish I could say that in the midst of all that quantity there are also signs of quality, but most of these shows run the gamut from promising to not-so-promising, with almost none genuinely good out of the gate.  Still, at least there's a lot to talk about. Brooklyn Nine-Nine - I often skip new comedies in these write-ups, because far more than dramas, comedies take time to find their voice.  It can be hard, judging from one or two episodes, to say whether a new sit-com will be appointment viewing, or amusing but not worth getting attached to, or just terrible (for a frame of reference, in past pilot season reviews I've been underwhelmed by the Community pilot, and thought 2 Broke...