Category: Film

  • Dear Damien Chazelle

    “Jazz.” You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

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  • Mondestrunken

    Just watched Moonlight, and, happily, it’s great. Need to watch it again on short order. Don’t know if composer Nicholas Britell truly had Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in his ear as he wrote the score, but I had to listen to that piece right away on finishing the film. It…

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  • realtime review: quantum of solace

    It stinks!

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  • 3:10 to Yuma

    Seems like a Western geared to kids who grew up watching “The O.C.”

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  • Hey, they broke my watch!

    Spending a lot of time in Chicago these days, as is Ms. Celluloid Pantry. So that’s enough to prompt the semi-annual screening of the Blues Brothers. Just noticed , after watching this movie maybe 50 times already, that right after John Candy’s immortal “This is car 55. We’re in a truck.” line, another cop is…

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  • Celluloid Potty

    David Denby had a terrific piece in the New Yorker a couple of weeks back, which made for great reading atop the thunder bucket (“le seau de tonnere” en Francais). The main thrust of the piece is how films that play with chronology, once the domain of arty directors like Resnais, have now become commonplace.…

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  • Bits ‘n pieces

    I fly a lot. About 70 segments last year. That being the case, I don’t waste a lot of time at airports. I get there when I need to be there, not any sooner. LGA is part of my extended nervous system. But JFK can still be a bit of a mystery. It’s the damn…

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  • Greed and Wickedness

    Bert‘s travel piece in yesterday’s Globe and Mail on seven deadly sins getaways has a nice resonance with Orson Welles‘ Lady from Shanghai. To represent the sin of greed, Bert picks the Chinese city of Macau. This immediately brings to mind the classic exchange between Welles and his real-life estranged wife, Rita Hatworth: Michael O’Hara:…

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  • One-upping the Dionnes

    A teenaged girl, with the improbable name of Kockenloker, who has a thing for soldiers goes out on the town determined to give the boys shipping out a send-off to remember. She gets loaded, and then gets in trouble (remembering nothing of the fateful night) and spends the rest of the movie trying to get…

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