Why would average parents trust Disney these days? Disney used to be family-friendly — now they’re Chinese communists pushing radical gender ideology. They’ve become the woke brain police, waving Mao’s little red book.
Day: June 17, 2023
Starting With Letter J
There aren’t many first-rate films that start with the letter J, or the first letter of my first name. John Wick, Jurassic, Jumanji, Jack Frost, Jason Goes to Hell, Jack, Judas and the Black Messiah, Jarhead, Jackass: The Movie, Justice league, Jingle All the Way, Jennifer’s Body…forget it.
As far as I can discern there are only ten worth mentioning, and in this order: (1) Jerry Maguire, (2) Jackie Brown, (3) Judgment at Nuremberg, (4) Jaws, (5) Juggernaut, (6) Joker, (7) Jack Reacher, (8) Jesus of Nazareth, (9) Johnny Guitar and (10) JFK. Okay, 11 if you add Jeremiah Johnson.
Deadpan Day in “Asteroid City”
“All the characters in Asteroid City seem to have attended Anderson School, so to speak, where the need for underreaction, clipped and quick, has been drummed into them; that would explain why Augie’s young daughters barely flinch, let alone cry, when they hear of their mother’s demise. Such a conceit — that emotions can be as stylized as clothes — is not a fault so much as a sly strategy. (You encounter it all the time in Restoration comedy.)
“Now and then, however, I couldn’t help yearning for the tough, sombre inhabitants of Bad Day at Black Rock: Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. When Tracy, one-armed and clad in funereal black, strikes Borgnine and sends him reeling through the doorway of a bar, with Ryan holding steady at the pinball machine beside them, the director, John Sturges, positions his figures with Andersonian care, but there’s a meaty moral tension in the fray. These guys are not fooling. Who, in Asteroid City, can make that sort of impact?” — from Anthony Lane’s 6.16 New Yorker review.
