The Stop Button

John Milius takes Conan the Barbarian very seriously. The occasional use of slow motion and the endlessness of Basil Poledouris’s cheesy score signal Milius’s dedication. So do the long and frequent sequences of shirtless Arnold Schwarzenegger playing with big swords. At the beginning of the film, when it’s the prologue and Milius strange approach actually […]

If asked, I’d probably blame MTV, video games, and CG for the downfall of American cinema. These reasons are my knee-jerk examples and, if they’re not the whole problem, they’re certainly the major contributing factors. However, following Field of Dreams, I think I’ll have to revise my answer. There’s a sense of cynicism about American […]

Watching Star Wars as an adult–as a cynical adult–is an interesting experience. There are plenty of frequent reminders of the first film’s “faults,” from Alec Guinness and Harrison Ford deriding the dialogue to many of the second trilogy’s reviews citing it as a weak film. As near as I can tell, I haven’t seen Star […]

Describing Ocean’s Eleven, Steven Soderbergh said he wanted to “make a movie that has no desire except to give you pleasure from beginning to end.”
He seems to have ripped off that idea from Sneakers.
Robert Redford is a lot more serious than I tend to think. So’s Paul Newman for that matter. We know the affable […]

What was that? Did anyone else see that? (Probably not, I’m watching the Canadian widescreen DVD).
Sayles actually ripped off the looking at the camera bit from The 400 Blows. He actually did it–while having the characters future self narrate the epilogue. I’ve been dreading watching Matewan for over a year, since April 2004 in fact. […]