Starting my Minnelli marathon off with The Clock made me think I had peaked early because surely nothing could top that. Then this came around and walloped me across the face, threw me in the mud, spit on the back of my head, kicked me in the gut and left me bewildered and inconsolable. There were genuinely periods of this where I almost had to turn it off because I was so beside myself in grief,…
The other day I realized that I had only ever seen one Vincent Minnelli movie, An American in Paris. I’ve long had many of his films on my watchlist, and so, as is my inclination to create random marathons for myself, I decided that it would be a fun little journey to marathon a bunch of his movies (maybe all of them?) over the course of this summer, perhaps ending with a rewatch of the one…
Early days still in my Minnelli marathon over the summer, but it’s interesting how so far the films seen have bounced between classic, rapturous musicals and searing melodramas largely centered around masculinity, the fragility of it and the ability for its presence or absence to corrode in equal measure. Home from the Hill features a sterling, sneering Robert Mitchum as the patriarch of a son he largely seems to have disdain towards, now inserting himself in…
The archetypes here can certainly read as reductive now, but I don’t think the film has dated too poorly (surprisingly, honestly, and a credit to Minnelli) and it’s unbelievably refreshing and remarkable to see a Hollywood picture of this day made with an entirely Black cast.
There’s bad deeds and mistreatments in this fantastical fable, but what really shines through the heart of it is a celebration of love. It’s fitting that in a film all…
Listen, I don’t disagree with anything this movie is saying about the commodification of women’s bodies and how that intersects with ageism (both internalized and externalized) and the nature of fame in the industry. But I think it’s got a Ruben Östlund level shallowness, lack of curiosity and insistence on punishing its audience with the same tepid observations slammed in your face like concrete over and over again into oblivion.
This is somehow 2 hours and 20 minutes of movie…
Alright, listen. This movie....
I’ll say for the first half I was like, okay whatever this is fine. Sure, it’s all artifice with no depth or dimension to it. There’s no attempt at characterization beyond “woa how evil!” or “aw damn they’re so haunted.” Who are these people? What do they care about? What do they feel? Doesn’t matter because “oooo creepy and dark.” It’s just generic procedural hokum, moving through the motions without any momentum or spark of creativity.…
