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Posts Tagged With ‘ bradley cooper ’

 

The Forever and Beautiful Sky

May 8th, 2023

Fifteen years ago, the Marvel Cinematic Universe was born with the release of Iron Man. It’s made billions of dollars. It’s had thirty-two entries released so far, another entry is up for release this year, and another nine and counting are in the pipeline.* Barring some kind of cultural cataclysm, I reckon the MCU will go on for a while yet, but a part of it is over. Jon Favreau’s Iron Man created the framework of what the modern MCU film looks like. Despite being a horror of a human being, Joss Whedon created the tone of the MCU, a union of rampaging snark and grounded mythology with The... Read More

The Last Spook Show

December 7th, 2021

There’s an old rule in screenwriting that posits the idea that your main character should be likable. Like many rules in the art world, it’s completely wrong. Cowardly studio executives and shallow screenwriting gurus drill down on this concept because it’s easy. They assume that if viewers are stuck with a protagonist that isn’t morally upright, they’ll check out. Put more simply, they assume that viewers are dumb. Your protagonist doesn’t have to be an icon of virtue — they only need to be interesting. Dirty Harry is nearly as much of a threat to public safety as the crooks he blasts.... Read More

The Road Better Off Not Taken

December 16th, 2018

As much as I love Unforgiven, In the Line of Fire, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and Dirty Harry, I think my favorite Clint Eastwood film is Escape from Alcatraz. As bank robber Frank Morris, you can see him plotting a way off the famed prison from the very first scenes of the film. Eastwood’s Morris is taciturn, intelligent, and does not suffer fools gladly.* Clint Eastwood casts a long shadow. He’s been in the entertainment industry since 1955, and he has 72 acting credits and 40 directorial credits. At age 88, he keeps at it, releasing a film or two every few years. He’s made some... Read More

Twelve Notes – Local Movie Reviewer Explores the New Remake “A Star is Born”

October 7th, 2018

One of the old Hollywood legends is about the genesis of 1937’s A Star Is Born. Allegedly, it was not-so-secretly about the relationship between Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay. While Fay was a success on Broadway, his film career fizzled. Stanwyck became a massive film star, and Fay worked out his resentment of her through alcoholism and physical abuse. For a while, that was the template for these remakes, that of the meteoric rise of the ingènue and the corresponding fall of the has-been. That tells us that, at the end of the day, there aren’t that many stories. In Christopher Booker’s... Read More

I Am Groot

May 7th, 2017

Now that the summer movie season is upon us, we can expect to be bombarded with think pieces about superhero fatigue. These pieces will tell us that audiences are absolutely done with superhero movies in general, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in particular. But you know what? I don’t buy it. I understand the sentiment, though. Summer movies used to be either broad comedies or action flicks about cops on the edge. Now, we’ve got people in garish costumes with goofy codenames interacting with CGI monstrosities. For people like my dear friend Devila, it can be unbearable. She’s... Read More

How Do You Say “That Sucked” In Hawaiian?

May 31st, 2015

Hollywood is a place where people who should fail, don’t. It’s where people who deserve to have long careers crash and burn. Earlier this year, Michael Mann’s film Blackhat was released, and it flopped big-time. The man who made amazing films like Heat, The Insider and Collateral, has seemingly lost his touch. Can he regain his mojo? Hopefully. Now that strange malady has afflicted Cameron Crowe with the execrable Aloha, but in this case, his career may be terminal. That’s a shame. See, Crowe occupies an interesting filmmaking niche. He’s not a soulless journeyman... Read More