My Own Little World

One of the hardest things for any film to do is to be human. True humanity is extremely hard to capture in the pre-planned conversations of a script or in the often-visionary lens of a director’s camera. Even going to such lengths as filming the same cast over twelve years (looking at you, Boyhood ) does not guarantee that a movie can be a true slice of life. Somehow, some way, Greta Gerwig, in her first film in the director’s chair no less, has made one of the most genuinely human films I have ever seen. Lady Bird is an organic piece of cinematic art that doesn’t try to be terribly artistically original or innovative; it simply tells a human coming-of-age story, and it does it better than nearly any other film I have seen. As much as I’d love to claim that there is no one aspect of the film that helps this, ultimately the film rests on the shoulders of its cast. Without the amazing performances from Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Lucas Hedges, and everyone else involved, t...

While watching Justice League , I couldn’t help comparing it to The Avengers . The two films are trying to do very similar things with their respective teams, and they both have very similar story beats (not unreasonable to expect given Joss Whedon’s heavy involvement in both). Honestly, that comparison does Justice League a lot more favors than you might otherwise expect: they both are fun, entertaining, bombastic blockbusters with characters the audience can get behind. Of course, Justice League is not in a vacuum, and neither is The Avengers . And that is where the problems start to show. The biggest problem I have with Justice League is its lack of character development. Now, this actually doesn’t come from this film itself, as all of the new characters (Cyborg, The Flash, and Aquaman) are enticing as presented here. The problem is that we haven’t had the prior experiences with these characters that we had in the Marvel Cinematic Universe before The Avengers came to ...

There are times when I will be watching a film, really enjoying it, and suddenly feeling like something is off. I often cannot put my finger on what exactly the flaw is, but because I can’t put my finger on it I dismiss it and still say the movie is good. There are other times, however, when after talking with other people about the film, I understand exactly what the flaw is. Watching Murder on the Orient Express was one of those experiences. I love myself a good old-school mystery in the vein of Hitchcock films like To Catch a Thief , and my prior experiences with star and director Kenneth Branagh (in particular his four-hour unabridged adaptation of Hamlet ) as well as the rest of this star-studded cast made me very excited to see this film. I didn’t expect a fantastic film, but I was secretly hoping that it would revitalize this largely dead genre. Unfortunately, Murder has one really big flaw that makes it largely forgettable: it doesn’t know how to balance knowledge ...

By this point, there has been an established formula in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. There’s a reason they are so successful at the box office: people see them as a reliable option for being entertained at the movies. That’s not a bad thing by any means – I thoroughly enjoy every single one of these movies and plan to for the foreseeable future – but it does mean that each successive film in the franchise needs to stand out at least a little bit from the rest to keep interest high. This year, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 partially failed at that with its convoluted plot and somewhat rehashed humor; on the contrary, Spider-Man: Homecoming successfully rebooted a character that has had problems in past in film, giving me a film that I really enjoyed. Thor: Ragnarok does something I didn’t expect in trying to change up the formula from the previous two films focusing on the character: it cranks the humor up to 11. OK, there’s more to it than that, like the way the film ...