The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford
Dullsville and then some. Artfully shot, for sure, but ripping off Malick isn’t as easy as it looks. The voice-over narration, always describing what we already saw, doesn’t create openings but locks the movie down even more than the airless, repetitive scenes between paranoid outlaws. Sam [...]
Posts Tagged ‘coming-of-age’
Konsum: Turkey Parade
This Is England
After transforming the bucolic English countryside into a site of horror with the nasty revenge tale Dead Man’s Shoes, Shane Meadows turns to Maggie Thatcher’s England with a skinhead coming-of-age story. This is England starts out as well-acted and superbly designed mid-eighties time-capsule but degenerates to a formulaic conclusion that cheapens everything that went before.
This [...]
Rocket Science
The first feature film by the director of Spellbound puts a refreshing spin on the coming-of-age formula, subverting what we expect from a story about a stuttering high school kid (Reece Thompson) who, with a little prodding by an older girl (Anna Kendrick), decides to join the debate team and win the coveted New Jersey [...]
Pan’s Labyrinth – Director’s Commentary
Plenty of DVD commentaries are happy to dispense self-aggrandizing anecdotes or reveal information that permanently damages the viewing experience (I’m looking at you, Peter Jackson.) Instead, Guillermo del Toro talks about storytelling concerns, structure, framing, staging, color choices, sound design, edits, references and symbolism — in other words, the where and why of creative decisions [...]