The Stop Button

An appreciation of amusements.

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Entries Tagged as 'Alan Rickman'

Love Actually (2003, Richard Curtis)

February 8th, 2008 No Comments

Richard Curtis–I think–said he wrote Love Actually from all his unused ideas. Just threw them into the oven and baked them together. To some degree, it shows. Unlike the usual big cast films, with lots of incidental meetings and relationships (as P.T. Anderson wrote, these things “happen all the time”), Love Actually is very loose. […]

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Die Hard (1988, John McTiernan)

December 25th, 2007 No Comments

Talking about Die Hard is complicated for lots of reasons. Besides Aliens, I think it’s the best popular action film ever made and, given when it came out, it’s very familiar. It shouldn’t be full of surprises and, in many ways, is not (though Theo and Karl having a bet on Takagi is something new […]

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The January Man (1989, Pat O’Connor)

October 3rd, 2007 No Comments

People hate The January Man, just hate it. It’s famous for being hated, in fact. It’s one of the earliest movies I can remember real bile about. Dune’s another one, but Dune deserves it. The January Man gets a lot of it because it’s from the pen of John Patrick Shanley, that screenwriting whirlwind behind […]

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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007, David Yates)

July 16th, 2007 No Comments

I’m out of touch. I realized I saw three blockbusters this summer, something I hadn’t done since 1999 or so. When the opportunity to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix presented itself, I leapt at it. I figured I could get a good sense of the state of the Hollywood blockbuster. Amusingly, […]

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