Continuing a series started by John D’Amico.
You could watch Wall Street first and then Boiler Room, or the other way around, or be meta and put them both on at the same time and quote the scene where everyone in Boiler Room quotes Wall Street while watching Wall Street.
However you choose, these two movies are way better than The Wolf of Wall Street or that Michael J. Fox one, the one with Helen Slater.
Continue reading Proposed Double Feature: ‘Wall Street’ & ‘Boiler Room’
Continuing a series started by John D’Amico.
Shattered Glass is a wonderful movie that doesn’t get enough credit. It’s that case where an indie movie is good enough to be a real movie, so nobody notices it. People do like it, but their eyes don’t light up the way they do when they talk about some shit that sucks like Wendy and Lucy. It’s hip to like crappy shit, whereas, it’s square to like good movies.
Continue reading Proposed Double Feature: ‘Shattered Glass’ & ’30 for 30: Big Shot’
There’s a great little story about how on the set of E.T., Spielberg slowly unwrapped a toy off camera to illicit a reaction from the young actor playing Elliott. I’ve always thought this story was a great way to explain how a filmmaker should approach exposition. Exposition is the easiest, most fun, and most misunderstood part of storytelling. But filmic exposition is generally stupid, because people are afraid of it.
Somebody once asked me, about my 50/50 Rule, “When making a movie, would you pay extra special attention to how it starts, since you lose interest in so many movies so fast?” The answer is decidedly no, because every frame of a movie is sacred and equally important. If you treat your entire movie like that, then you don’t need to spend extra attention to any one part of it. Exposition is too often just underestimated as something that has to be blown through in order to get to the fun stuff. To counteract this, the indies have bloated their exposition with way too much visual minutiae. You can build a ‘stark’, ‘oblique’, ‘atmospheric’ world with your story—you don’t need shots that hold too long on a girl as she wistfully puts on makeup.
Jurassic Park is my favorite exercise in exposition, and in a way, the entire movie is exposition.
Continue reading On Exposition
God’s Not Dead (2014)
Directed by Harold Cronk
Written by Chuck Konzelman and Gary Solomon
113 min.
Mild spoilers, but who cares.
There’s a scene in God’s Not Dead where a woman who has been diagnosed with cancer sits down with her boyfriend for a fancy dinner at a nice restaurant. The boyfriend smiles excitedly and says “I just made partner.” She responds with “I have cancer.” He replies, “Can’t this wait?” and then proceeds to break up with her for having cancer.
This is what Christians think atheists are like.
Also, apparently, just about everyone is an atheist.
Continue reading God is Dead?: A Review of ‘God’s Not Dead’
Greg DeLiso: Why are all of these cool people dying? Harold Ramis right after Philip Seymour Hoffman and Bob Casale from Devo, and now, a guy I’m ashamed to say I did not know the name of. But, his face, his voice, and his performances were a huge part of my childhood.
Independence Day was a huge theater going experience for me as a kid. My mom took me one Summer afternoon when I was ten years old, and it was like my The Day the Earth Stood Still or The Blob—a fun excursion into the bigness of movies, the kind of stuff Spielberg and Scorsese talk about from their youth.
Continue reading R.I.P. James Rebhorn: Greg & Cody’s Thoughts