Month: April 2020

Directors think John Cena is a bargain The Rock, but what they’re really getting is an overpriced tree stump. He has the personality of dry, slightly burnt toast. It’s not entirely Cena’s fault. Director Andy Fickman clearly has no vision and no funny bone. He’s not sure whether he’s making a satire or a slapstick […]… Continue reading Playing With Fire — ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES

It’s very easy to forget that the monarchy is made up with real, living, breathing people. Extremely privileged people of course, who are often very out of touch with the real world and therefore the people they are meant to represent as well. But people nonetheless. Victoria (Emily Blunt) reminds us that even palaces can […]… Continue reading The Young Victoria — ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES

AD – This post contains gifted items but all thoughts are my own I think I speak for a lot of people when I say one of the main things I miss about life before COVID-19 is going on holiday, travelling and experiencing new things. April was actually looking to be one of the best […]… Continue reading 8 Travel Themed Movies To Get You Through Lockdown — Jenny in Neverland

Charles Custer, a retired Chicago lawyer whose startlingly detailed photographs of Route 66 businesses that he and his wife Irene took in the early 1950s were recently re-discovered, died at age 91 in January. The Chicago Sun-Times described Custer’s remarkable life and photographic legacy in an obituary last week. A memorial service had been planned […]… Continue reading Charles Custer, a photographer of Route 66 in the early 1950s, dies at age 91 — Route 66 News

The Western ceased as an artform in early 1993, when Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven closed the chapter on a much-loved and rarely-maligned genre. Westerns were wholly post Manifest United States, though their premise has been recycled through Shakespeare and Kurosawa, setting the human experience against a backdrop of nothhingness – as the desert has sand and […]… Continue reading [2016] Hell or High Water — The Academy Nominees Project

Power can be a frightening subject, but it can also be used to explain away the end of things. Partnerships, whether thrust upon or voluntary, are continuous, minor exchanges of power throughout. When a sovereign directs his subjects to do the bidding of the Crown, the King is exploiting his uninundated power upon ultimately powerless […]… Continue reading [2014] Whiplash — The Academy Nominees Project

Nostalgia is a hell of a marketing technique. It, as a concept, can be sufficiently disaggregated so that each person’s experience is both universal and personal. Lots of new media relies on the unreachable past. There exists, as I’ve written about before, a term called sonder, which means nostalgia for a time not one’s own.… Continue reading [1973] American Graffiti — The Academy Nominees Project

The Gilded Age in the American experience subsists as worthwhile to study because of its uninterrupted, demonstrated prosperity (curiously corresponding to a legal ban on drink) immediately followed by superficially mitigated disaster and calamity. The Depression certainly carved space for the creation of great works; jazz and photography each had hallmark decades and increased the […]… Continue reading [1951] A Place in the Sun — The Academy Nominees Project

A conscious creature develops a personality over time, though differently than it grows physically. An individual human, say, is governed by genetic code hardwired into every bit of body; its height and skin color determined and unchangeable save an external change. In this way the body is determined and fraught with nature. In other ways, […]… Continue reading [1989] My Left Foot — The Academy Nominees Project

There’s a film (not nominated for Best Picture, probably incorrectly) called The Thin Blue Line, which doesn’t really distinguish between narrative fiction and fictional narrative, but asks the audience to follow incredibly closely and decide for themselves what happened. Errol Morris took this film in a brilliant direction as each person watching the movie (documentary?) […]… Continue reading [1976] All The President’s Men — The Academy Nominees Project