Drive is what happens when Lost in Translation and Oldboy have a baby.
The moving picture has been around for over 100 years, and has been a part of the pop consciousness for almost as long. From the earliest days of nickelodeons, movies have been part of mass entertainment.
When I was sixteen and seventeen and eighteen and nineteen and twenty, when I was learning how to be who I’d eventually become, I think it was safe to say that I was an idiot. Like the time I destroyed my wheel hitting a curb on the way to see Primus, then rolled the car back in the jack. Then the show sucked.
Burn After Reading is the Coen brothers‘ first movie since No Country for Old Men, which everyone decided was the movie to honor for the brothers’ career of nearly unbroken awesomeness.
Anton Corbijn is one of the key image-makers from the post-punk era, so obviously, when I heard that he was directing a movie based on the life of Ian Curtis, I had to see it.
Here’s the part where I speak—again—about how awesome it is to live in New York, where the movie is playing at the Film Forum.
Control is crushing. The movie tells the story you need to know, even without a familiarity with Joy Division. Curtis is not a sympathetic protagonist, but he’ll still break your heart.
I saw The Darjeeling Limited on Saturday.
To start with, things like this are among the reasons I love living in New York City. Knowing that a huge number of good movies will open here long before they open elsewhere—if they open at all—is very gratifying to me.
The movie itself was quite good. It fits well into Wes Anderson’s oeuvre of dysfunctional family stories. It comes across as a bit strange, though, compared to the intensive melancholy that has increasingly become the focus over Anderson’s career. It’s much more manic than The Life Aquatic, and this is probably a good thing.
In short, I’m still not clear, exactly, on how I feel about it. The themes are the same as usual, but it’s so wildly different in how it goes about addressing them that it strikes as a bit weird. Nevertheless, it comes recommended, as does its prologue/part 1, Hotel Chevalier.
It’s not every day that a new Wes Anderson movie opens on my birthday. Discuss.
I ride my bicycle around New York a lot. It is often faster than any other form of transportation and always more fun, plus it makes me feel a lot better about the fact that I don’t get any exercise, primarily because it’s, you know, exercise.
On Monday, I went to see Paprika, which was simultaneously excellent and bizarre beyond explanation. I rode my bike to the theater, which is stupid for several reasons. To start with, it was 85° (Fahrenheit, just in case it needed to be clarified) that day. I rode into Manhattan at midday, and I had to leave my bike chained up outside for a few hours. Nevertheless, I persevered. And my bike didn’t get stolen.
After about eight years of citing American History X as my favorite movie without any serious consideration that anything else might even compete, I’ve come to a realization: it’s been supplanted.
Midway through the (estimated… and I’m totally serious about the number) hundredth or so viewing of the usurper earlier tonight, I realized that it has done what I thought impossible: it’s come to mean more to me than American History X.
When Margot told Richie, “I think we’re just going to have to be secretly in love with each other and leave it at that,” through the tent flap, it hit me: The Royal Tenenbaums is my new favorite film.
This is a big fucking deal to me.