Film and television
Topic archive / 1,464 posts
See also my film diary
Three Identical Strangers
There’s a helluva story here, but this documentary is more interested in entertaining than enlightening, and at least one of the conclusions it draws is downright insulting.
Eighth Grade
Hello, I am a seasoned veteran of all manner of deranged horror films, and I watched most of this through my fingers.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Discretion is the better part of valor. Heroism ≠ leadership. I think I enjoyed this even more the second time.
Happy Gilmore
That whole unlikely-victory-of-an-ill-mannered-buffoon-enabled-by-TV-ratings thing lands a little differently now.
The Salesman
Asghar Farhadi’s sensitivity to the contours of domestic conflict—in a universal sense but also as it relates to certain segments of Iranian society—is extraordinary. This was also true of A Separation, his previous film, and in the case of The Salesman, his focus on the complicated residue of assault rings true in a way that makes the film necessarily and rewardingly difficult.
Links: June 2018
Hello, dear reader!
June is gone, but its links remain.
It was a relatively busy month on my site! I had an unexpected reason to revisit an animated student film I made 20 years ago, wrote about designing better concert listings, chronicled my experience learning about the future of typography at the Ampersand conference, and offered middling reviews of the year’s most celebrated horror films, A Quiet Place and Hereditary.
This month’s links are the sort… See more →
The sitcom in my dream: When I accidentally kill 2 of the teens who broke my window, I adopt the 3rd, played by current-day Macaulay Culkin.
Incredibles 2
I can’t decide if its ideas are muddled or merely complex, but as a pure action movie, Incredibles 2 is a lot of fun. I’m disappointed that the filmmakers couldn’t find a way to avoid the strobing effects that exclude epileptic viewers. For a company as creatively industrious as Pixar, that struck me as a lazy choice.
As for the preceding short film, Bao, bravo to Pixar for stepping away from the Eurocentric boys’ club,… See more →
Twelve Bucks, Twenty Years
The strange story of a student film with a surprising shelf life
A couple of years ago, I got a very unexpected email:
I wanted to inquire as to whether you were student at Kutztown University under the tutelage of Dr. Tom Schultz, and if you made an animated film in 1998 under the tile "Twelve Bucks".
Apart from the misspelled name of my professor (it’s actually Schantz), this was correct. But why on earth would someone be contacting me about an old, obscure student film?
The… See more →
Hereditary
For whatever reason, horror is having a moment of sustained critical cachet, with a growing list of scary movies receiving praise for emotional resonance, thematic richness, and/or excellence of execution that transcend the genre’s usual stale jump scares. Hereditary seems keen to get in on the action, offering a sophisticated layer of fraught family drama atop a pulpier horror foundation; its familiar depictions of unraveling psyches and things going bump in the night are shaped… See more →
Not gonna pretend I’m not onboard with the Degrassi TNG reunion in the new Drake video. youtu.be/rIhx2wZ8jnA
This morning’s road saw makes A Quiet Place’s vicious alien invaders who hunt with hypersensitive hearing seem like a beautiful fantasy. 🌈
A Quiet Place
A Quiet Place centers on a family living in a not-too-distant future in which vicious aliens with hypersensitive hearing have wiped out much of the world’s population. A little over a year into the invasion, after losing their youngest child (of three) to the creatures, they have another child on the way. In a world where silence is absolutely crucial for survival, a newborn baby is the ultimate liability, and while we’re privy to the… See more →
That movie really stuck with her.
Links: May 2018
Hello, dear reader!
May is gone, but its links remain.
The only thing I published on my site this month was a brief, snarky review of a 69-year-old movie (nice), but if all goes well in June, I’ll have a couple of substantial posts about creative projects (new and old) coming your way.
The links below include some meaty reporting on politics and a triptych of opinion pieces on our culture wars’ state of discourse.… See more →
I don’t really believe in awards, but I’ll happily take this as evidence that justice still exists. @OfficialJLD is a national treasure. twitter.com/washingtonpost…
The Fountainhead
I’ve read a number of Ayn Rand’s essays, but never bothered with her fiction until now. I expected overt advocacy for her self-centered Objectivist philosophy, but I also expected it to be packaged in something approximating a compelling story. After all, The Fountainhead has been devoured by legions of basement dwellers who couldn’t make it through two pages of Kant or Foucault. But apart from Gary Cooper’s and Patricia Neal’s radical egoists settling for fucking… See more →
By happenstance, I just finished a rewatch of all nine seasons of Seinfeld, so I’m pleased to be perfectly primed for this. twitter.com/mattsinger/sta…
You Were Never Really Here
Someone finally made the meditative arthouse thriller the Pizzagate crowd has been waiting for.
In my dream, I made some pasta salad for David Lynch, and he disliked it enough to kill off my Twin Peaks character.
Links: April 2018
Hello, dear reader!
April is gone, but its links remain.
I’ve been obsessed with my current personal project lately (more on that soon), so apart from a handful of very brief movie reviews, I didn’t do much writing in April, though the web designers in the audience might want to take a look at my notes from last week’s Generate conference.
The links this go-round include some gems for Prince fans on the second anniversary of… See more →
“[P]art of the conditioning of the ‘patriarchal ideal’ is to make women feel empowered by it on their ‘own terms.’” nytimes.com/2018/04/23/mov…
Saturday:
- Partitioning grids
- Film discussion
- Back to partitioning grids
Isle of Dogs
Wes Anderson’s films are all effectively stop-motion animation, and part of what I find off-putting about most of his live-action work is the resulting reverse-uncanny-valley effect. I had been over his schtick for years by the time Fantastic Mr. Fox came out and made me realize that the world of proper animation is where Anderson belongs. Isle of Dogs is a welcome return to that place.
A Bay of Blood
This stylish proto-slasher is stupider and trashier than the more highly regarded gothic works of Bava’s horror ouevre, and more enjoyable for it. A Bay of Blood is a must-see for anyone interested in how giallo films paved the way for slashers, especially since Friday the 13th borrowed from it liberally.
Molly Ringwald on John Hughes: “How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose?” newyorker.com/culture/person…
Altered States
This dizzying array of Cronenbergian psychobabble, pulp horror, and avant-garde psychedelia doesn’t quite hang together, and its ending is pure garbage, but overall it is more than bonkers enough to recommend it. Pairs well with The Manitou.
Forbidden Planet
Considering when Forbidden Planet was made, its special effects are astonishing, and its psychological concept is ambitious. But that concept is explicated through far more dialogue than action, moving back and forth between just two fairly modest locations, and the result is kinda boring.
Links: March 2018
Hello, dear reader!
March is gone, but its links remain.
I gave a brief talk about designing information at the annual Society for News Design conference, and also shared my notes from the other talks I took in.
Always ahead of the trends, I left Facebook at the beginning of the month, a little over two weeks before the news about Cambridge Analytica broke (news which long-time readers may not have found shocking). Since think… See more →
Overheard in the john at a hockey game: “Who makes a Han Solo movie about ‘putting a team together’? It should be about him stealing shit!”
Police Story
This movie has everything: police slapstick, domestic slapstick, courtroom slapstick, office slapstick, and most importantly, several exquisitely staged set pieces overflowing with thoroughly mind-blowing action. Jackie Chan may be the most committed entertainer in the world, and Police Story is among his finest endeavors.
🚨 For your weekend: Prince’s spectacular 1987 concert film, Sign o’ the Times, is now streaming on Amazon Prime. amazon.com/gp/video/detai…
My Seinfeld spec script will be about how Jerry came into possession of a copy of Child’s Play 2.
Links: February 2018
Hello dear reader!
February is gone, but its links remain.
My site was pretty quiet in February, up until yesterday when I published the final post in a series about the process behind my redesign. This one is about color, and the recent revelations I’ve had about how to work with it.
This month’s links have the usual range of topics, with the highlight for me being a treasure trove of interviews and demos on… See more →
Fun fact: Sean Connery, who played Harrison Ford’s father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, is only 12 years older than Ford.
Annihilation
Listen (shh) to what the flower people say Aahhh Listen, it’s getting louder every day
Can’t say I regret watching Corey Haim save his high school from terrorists, and I will now watch him do the same for his university.
Alan Thicke is the police chief. He just said “I suggest you think with your heart instead of your badge.”
Amazon Prime’s unparalleled selection of schlock spans many decades. On the docket tonight: Corey Haim saves his school from terrorists.
Weekend escapism.
I could watch @donttrythis’s giddy tour of @aardman all day. And there are enough videos to make that possible! youtu.be/stSYs7a2UHE
Hey, what’s everyone doing tonight? I assume, like me, you’ll all be bingeing the Murdoc episodes of the original MacGyver series.
I beat this drum a lot, but if you love movies, you need to be on @letterboxd. And their newly-updated iOS app is 🥇 itunes.apple.com/app/id10542710…
Links: January 2018
Hello, dear reader!
January is gone, but its links remain.
In my little corner of the internet, I posted a roundup of my favorite stuff from 2017 (including a look ahead at plans for 2018). As a subscriber, you may be especially interested in the stats I compiled about the 299 links I shared last year.
I released my first open source software project, Column Setter, a Sass tool for building custom responsive grids that… See more →
Some @AGWC footage of me is in a @HSpecialSurgery ad, but my @usairguitar buddy Papa Air actually had surgery there! So I updated the ad.
Apparently I was on the teevee last night (around the halfway mark): youtube.com/watch?v=W5GvsW…
My favorite film of 2017 was Negative Space, nominated for Best Animated Short. Trailer and behind-the-scenes: thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/negati…
Netflix’s animated show Big Mouth is impressive. Equally sweet and filthy, it’s a more honest take on puberty than live action would allow.
One of my favorite things about Lady Bird is its quick pace. Character development via tons of tiny moments. avclub.com/lady-bird-will…
That Was 2017
The highlights of what I took in and put out
Projects
Since 2011, working with A Book Apart was my way of contributing to the design community while my own direction as a designer was uncertain. Over the course of 2016, as my new job at ProPublica restored my enthusiasm for design, I wanted to get back to working on my own projects and sharing what I learned in the process. Making time for that meant something had to give, so after producing the paperback/PDF… See more →