There will be puns, there will be awards, there will be awesome. Based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson (whose movies I often failed to appreciate in the past) has made a magnificent epic about the price of the precious resources, liquid and otherwise, that we extract from the ground — and from other [...]
Posts Tagged ‘epic’
Cleopatra, Sith, Death Proof
Prompted by the grand finale of Rome, we took another look at Cleopatra, which is one of those movies I can rewatch every few years. Compare-and-contrast is a fun enough game, and Marcy, who was never entirely sure which of the HBO characters were fictional, was entertained by noting differences in motivation and plot. Every [...]
Intolerance
D.W. Griffith’s epic about “Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages” is surprisingly compelling for a silent film from 1916. “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,” four stories take shape. In the modern tale, a working family endures greedy bosses, meddling “uplifters” and false murder charges. The other three stories tell of Christ’s crucifixion, the St. Bartholomew’s [...]
