An American tourist in Russia
Disney got into the habit of buying popular pre-existing franchises and to churn out “content.” And an easy cheap way to come up with “content” is to invent explanations for every little thing that didn’t need explaining, and is actually becomes worse when it is explained. All recent Disney entries commit this crime to some … Read more
Recently I re-watched the Kenneth Branagh film adaption of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. This was the first time I had seen the story as an adult, and it hit me differently. Enough so that I felt the need to write something about it. Just about everyone is force fed Shakespeare as a child, and … Read more
Recently I saw a lovely 1940 film The Bright Path set in the 1930s. The main character Tanya is an ignorant, hysterical and illiterate peasant who works as a cleaning lady at a provincial hotel. She falls in love with a promising engineer but rejects his romantic advances on her because she’s not his social equal. He’s … Read more
I finally got around to watching the 2022 Russian war film The Best In Hell, and was underwhelmed. Not unexpected, but disappointing nonetheless. A thoughtful and poignant Ukraine war film would actually be valuable now. The Best In Hell parades itself as such a film, but underdelivers and focuses on all the wrong things. The … Read more
Seldom is a sequel widely recognized as superior to its predecessor, with most follow-ups struggling to recapture the relevance or dynamism of the original. There are exceptions—Aliens comes to mind. But they are few and far between. As often as not, a sequel is a shameless and hamfisted cash grab, with remakes typically no better. Yet … Read more