Correction: This article was updated to accurately reflect Jeanine Pirro’s comment. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, affirmed Sunday that the bullet that hit a Secret Service agent at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was fired by the alleged gunman. Pirro told host Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of… Source link
It would be easier to take the aforementioned 2010s-era Pixar sequel-saturation strategy in better humor if their recent “original” movies didn’t feel so compromised, as if there were suddenly a more stringent series of corporate demands to justify a theatrical release. (At least that’s my fan theory to explain why several of their more-or-less straight-to-streaming features far outclass the theatrical releases that would have had some overlap in production.) Elio was notoriously subjected to heavy tinkering to dial back the story’s autobiographical queerness, and while the final result is a funny sci-fi adventure with some swell alien designs, it also feels like key elements have been surgically removed and replaced with plastic. Elemental, meanwhile, an actual word-of-mouth hit during an uncertain era for Pixar, gets bogged down in a visually resplendent world (where people are made of water, fire, earth, and air) that’s incoherent as metaphor—and moreover, kinda wishy-washy as character-based fantasy, too. While some of the other Pixar originals of this period feel like they were let out slightly underbaked to make a prescribed …
The best biopics ever made, like the worst, face a simple enough task: tell us the true-ish story of someone’s life. But that simplicity and accountability to fact—while recognizing that sometimes, you just can’t let the full truth get in the way of a good movie—has both inspired and confounded some of the great directors of our time. The genre has given us the likes of Lawrence of Arabia, in the conversation for greatest film ever made, and some of the best performances in cinema history (hello, Robert De Niro in Raging Bull). It has also produced some proper clangers that we’ll do the kindness of leaving unnamed. Biopics recall the origin stories of the world’s greatest musicians, activists, artists and sportspeople; they capture snapshots of their greatest moments; all too often, they offer us a window into the rise and fall. All the while, they allow an actor to do their best accent-augmented impression of a famous historical figure—which often comes with the higher-than-usual chance of winning an Oscar. Ultimately, the best biopics connect us …
At first, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were not good. Neither of their first two albums make it into this top 10, and with good reason—for their first half-decade, the band were mostly focused on producing a fundamentally unpalatable brand of funk that was probably quite fun to play but absolutely no good at all to listen to. Their third album (featured here in the no. 10 spot) was better, mostly just by virtue of being a watered-down version of the first two. But on fourth album Mother’s Milk, guitarist John Frusciante got involved, and everything began to change. Not immediately—they had to work out their new sound, and there were some missteps and ill-advised circling-backs along the way—but in retrospect, they can now claim to have originated and developed a sound that was completely original and also, eventually, actually really good to listen to. Those funk roots were still there, but they were tempered by a melodic sympathy and a gentleness that either evaded or did not interest them on earlier records. Their lyrics, …
From full-throttle action flicks to moody boxing dramas, the best movie fight scenes tend to boast brutal physicality, world-class choreography and huge personal stakes. They’re gladiatorial bouts between mortal enemies, pushing themselves to the limit to come out on top; they test the limits of our hero’s endurance, and what they’ll do in order to win, or just survive. Often it’s with fists, sometimes with weapons. Occasionally, the entire set is weaponized. (We’re looking at you, Mission: Impossible — Fallout.) Whatever the case, the greatest fight scenes are gripping, visceral, and merciless. And it’s not always a one-on-one affair: in Kill Bill Vol. 1, The Bride (Uma Thurman) is forced to dispatch an entire ballroom full of sword-wielding Yakuza before her final confrontation with O’Ren Ishi (Lucy Liu). In Kingsman: The Secret Service, it’s an aggy Colin Firth versus a church full of religious fundamentalists to the tune of Lynyrd Skynyrd. And don’t even get us started on the Bond movies, where scraps with villains and henchmen have been a staple since Sean Connery first …
A singular accomplishment, getting us to laugh at our total nuclear annihilation. Looking back, are the early ’60s Kubrick’s Comedy Period, or was he just working with Peter Sellers a lot? There are certainly funny moments in the remaining half-dozen movies he’d make after Dr. Strangelove, but there’s also a sense of, OK, if we’re going to do a real comedy, let’s do the last one. Is that idea arrogant or visionary? Probably both, as evidenced by the fact that Strangelove’s ticking-clock doomsday scenario, played straight the very same year as Fail Safe, would be revived in countless action/thriller movies of greater fake gravitas but lesser genuine artistry in the decades since blowing up the Cold War. In more retrospective news: Peter Sellers probably deserved that Best Actor Oscar for his triple role here as a British officer, American president, and German psychotic. (Weirdly, a year later Lee Marvin became the only actor before Michael B. Jordan to win a Best Actor Oscar for a multiple-role job, in the less ambitious Cat Ballou.) For that …
On the 10th of April 1970, Paul McCartney announced what had, by then, been falsely reported so many times as to seem almost impossible—The Beatles, the biggest band to ever do it, were finished. Within a week, McCartney had released his first solo record. Before the year was out, all three of his former bandmates had done the same. And as of today, the solo Beatles have collectively produced around 85 albums, depending how you count. That’s a lot to wade through for anyone keen on venturing beyond the band’s tight 12-studio-album discography. But wade we must, and there is so much to learn in our wading. These records are charged with parting barbs and so variously excellent and awful and bewildering. They contain not just a huge quantity of interesting and enjoyable music, but a path toward an understanding of what it was that made the band work as it did. Who was good at what? Who needed what from whom, whose instincts were balanced by whose, and what kinds of adventures might result …
What makes an Oscar acceptance speech one of the best Oscar speeches? Conventional wisdom would have it that if you’re lucky enough to win an Academy Award, you should keep it short, try not to bad-mouth anyone, and most importantly, just enjoy the moment. But more often than not, the best Oscar speeches have defied those traditional expectations. Some of the most memorable Oscar acceptance speeches are the ones in which which actors and filmmakers have used their time on stage to draw attention to the political causes of the day, controversy be damned; others just bristle with excitable chaos, explosions of emotion that feel all-the-more real than the overly rehearsed performances of gratitude that dominate the awards circuit. Like the performances and movies that garner Oscar statuettes, the Oscars speeches that linger in the memory—and there have been hundreds of them in the many decades of Academy history— make us feel something. Whether we’re watching a loveable underdog or a legend of the game who is finally being given their dues, their time on …
At the time and maybe in certain corners since, there was a sense that Titanic’s chief rival for the Best Picture Oscar that felt particularly locked and loaded since sometime around its second weekend at the box office was L.A. Confidential, which also served as the coolly cynical noir counterpoint to the squishy sentimentality of James Cameron’s massive-scale epic. So has enough time passed to say that no, Titanic is just a vastly better movie? Here’s my thinking: There are plenty of Los Angeles-set noir pictures that do it just as well as L.A. Confidential, albeit often with less starry casts, trimmer running times, and black-and-white cinematography to boot. But as much as Titanic was received as a lavish throwback to an earlier era, Cameron’s skill in the field of harnessing spectacle and structuring a story around it doesn’t have nearly so much precedent. The epics of yore that Titanic recalls are far less propulsive or visceral than what Cameron accomplishes here; it’s maybe the only genuine disaster-movie classic ever made. 4-6. It Happened One …
Forget the Olympics—which country has the best version of Love Is Blind? As season 10 of the US series hits Netflix, we’ve ranked the finest LIB incarnations from around the world. Source link
