brainsplotch

 As is often the case when a famous actor dies, I immediately have to investigate their filmographies and see the movies they did that I have never seen. Is it morbid? Maybe? I like to think of it as honoring their careers and a convenient cinematic educational experience. I recently did this with Robert Redford. Soon after he died, I watched The Candidate , The Hot Rock , and 3 Days of the Condor in quick succession.  The Candidate is a fascinating portrait of a man who goes from principled do-gooder lawyer to cynical presidential candidate. It's also a quaint reminder of a time when American politics didn't seem quite as cutthroat and despicable as it is in 2025. The Hot Rock is a funny crime/jewel heist caper that had to have been an influence on Steven Soderbergh's Ocean movies, and it has to be said that Redford is the most handsome ex-con in film history. 3 Days of the Condor is a movie I'd heard referenced multiple times in the last few years, and it didn...

After a little trepidation based on its middling reviews, we went to the cinema to see Springsteen : Deliver Me From Nowhere . Perhaps due to my lowered expectations, or maybe because I'm just a pushover who goes to the movies WANTING to like what I've paid to see, or possibly because it actually IS a good movie, I ended up enjoying Springsteen : Deliver Me From Nowhere . (I will henceforth simply refer to it as Springsteen ). From what I gather, the main complaints about Springsteen  is that it doesn't have enough music and that it falls prey to rock biopic cliches. First, about the music: I don't agree with those criticisms. It has just enough music. The movie is, among other things, about Bruce's creation of the Nebraska album. He has finished the 1981  River tour and is renting a house in Colts Neck, NJ, getting inspiration from Flannery O'Connor, the Terence Malick movie  Badlands, reading   microfilm newspaper accounts of the real-life murders that ...

It only took us a month and change, but we finally saw One Battle   After Another in the theater. For anyone not in the know, it's the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie--based in part on Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland --that has received mainly rapturous reviews. It is deserving of the praise. It is a propulsive rollercoaster ride of a movie that doesn't feel as long as it is (162 minutes). I only looked at my watch one time, which is pretty good for me in a long film. I'm not sure if I should bother with a plot synopsis since that is easily available elsewhere, but basically, Leonardo diCaprio stars as a grizzled, burned out, pot-smoking, ex-radical revolutionary who is suddenly forced into his old life to find his kidnapped daughter. In the process, he and she are pursued by various nefarious forces, including Sean Penn as a heavily muscled, severely uptight white supremacist military weirdo named Col. Steven J. Lockjaw. It's a hilariously ridiculous ...