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Wild and Crazy Guys

It’s difficult to conceptualize now, with it being such an institution, that Saturday Night Live was once cutting-edge. Nearly fifty years on, it has fallen into tedium, barely anything on the show can be considered truly original, daring, or groundbreaking -and you could make the argument it is less relevant than ever as the sole standard-bearer of American sketch comedy, with fairly meagre political satire, and a cast who with less prospects in a comedy-depleted media landscape are less likely to break out beyond its parameters. But when it was formed, it represented a new and radical kind of television comedy, a nexus-point in the counter-culture driven by some of the most distinct young talents of the era waiting to break out. And it’s that nostalgia that director Jason Reitman and his writing partner Gil Kenan feed on in Saturday Night , a movie chronicling the chaotic night and enormous stakes of the franchise’s first ever show on October 11 th , 1975. And the circumstances of th
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The Apprentice Exposes the Roots of Donald Trump’s America

It’s wild to see, late in a U.S. Presidential election cycle, a biopic on one of the candidates that plays like a Scorsese crime drama, featuring scenes of blackmail, spousal abuse, gay orgies, and family backstabbing. It’s even wilder to know how little hyperbole is in such scenes; but then such is the character of Donald Trump -or at least the character, as this movie argues, that was moulded by his mentor Roy Cohn. Trump and his allies have unsurprisingly endeavoured to suppress The Apprentice  since its Cannes debut -especially given the timing of its release and particularly damning portrait of the former and potentially future President, as it chronicles the formation of the ruthless tactics and zero-sum-game philosophy that have informed so much of his business and political careers. The fact of the movie’s distribution should not be taken for granted in light of this -because it doesn’t just aspire to tell the story of Trump but of the America that he has created. So much of it

The Joke’s On You

Joker: Folie á  Deux  is a comic book movie and a musical made by Todd Phillips, a director deeply embarrassed by both genres. That should tell you all you need to know about why it so dramatically doesn’t work. Phillips made the choice to dot this movie with musical sequences, and yet publicly resists the Musical label in what appears to be a fear that it makes the film seem less serious. And just as in his 2019 Joker , he does everything possible to keep the comic book origins of this material at a distance. In fairness, it’s an approach that worked out for him on the last movie, which despite being particularly bad and derivative was a huge hit, and even won its star Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar for one of the worst performances of his career. But Phillips seems to dislike the people who loved the earlier film as much as those who hated it, if his portrait of their in-film analogue is anything to go by. Honestly, it’s difficult to parse why he made this movie, short of the blank cheque

The Criterion Channel Presents: Häxan (1922)

The most fascinating thing about Häxan  is that it  is  old enough now (at over a century) to be looked at with the same lens that it itself uses to examine the Middle Ages. Just as it posits that the apparent witches of centuries ago were simply women with "hysteria" that the people of that time didn't understand or care to diagnose, we now know hysteria itself to be a pseudo-scientific understanding of mental illness derived from juvenile psychology and plain old misogyny more than any accurate medicinal basis. It is still an intriguing and utterly mesmerizing film though, perhaps because of this fact that so squarely places it in history by its own measure of historiography. But it's also spontaneously fun and wild in a way that dispels any misconception that the silent era was drab and boring. This is a movie about witchcraft and demons, that depicts torture and hell, features nudity, sacrilege, and the Devil constantly flicking his tongue perversely, masturbating

Will & Harper is a Tender Roadmap for Friendship and Understanding

The quickest cure to transphobia is knowing a trans person. It’s a conventional idea but it’s not an untrue one. Even for those who may not be transphobic but don’t really understand the transgender experience or transgender issues, just talking openly and honestly with someone of that identity can make a whole lot of difference. Especially considering all of the propaganda and misinformation and hate that is routinely promoted about the trans community, it’s so important that those empathetic human connections are made. Will & Harper  is a documentary about making that connection; and one that hopes to vicariously be that point of understanding for its audience. It is essentially in documentary form a Driving Miss Daisy  or Green Book  kind of movie, in that it’s less for an LGBTQ audience than for the cis straight folks as a crash course in how to be an ally to the transgender people in their lives. Unlike those kind of movies though it is both relevant in this time of increased

The Wild Robot is a Rare Display of Original, Dignified Studio Animation

In the modern sphere of American studio animation, in which brand recognition either by specific franchises or standardized pandering style dominates with no end in sight, a movie like The Wild Robot is a breath of fresh air. It belongs to that dying breed of genuine originality in that medium; though it most likely would not have been produced at all if not for the track record of its director Chris Sanders, who co-directed one of  the best acclaimed post-Renaissance Disney movies ( Lilo & Stitch ), and one of the best DreamWorks movies period ( How to Train Your Dragon ). And The Wild Robot  sees him back at DreamWorks to deliver for them perhaps their last great original movie. It’s the fairly nifty story of an advanced robot crash-landing on Earth in a dense boreal forest wilderness where in efforts to abide by her programming to serve and complete tasks, she accidentally kills a goose and crushes all but one of her eggs. After the gosling hatches and imprints on her she determ

The Grandeur, the Folly, the Dream of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: Another One from the Heart

“Don’t let the now destroy the forever.” In Orson Welles’ other masterpiece F for Fake , there is a scene in which, in his discussion on the transcendent value of art irrespective of its creators’ authenticity, he observes the Chartres Cathedral. “It might just be this one anonymous glory, of all things” he said. “This rich stone forest, this epic chant, this gaiety, this grand choiring shout of affirmation, which we choose, when all our cities are dust, to stand intact. To mark where we’ve been. To testify on what we had on a list to accomplish.” Art is what survives when all is said and done, its expression of the human spirit will far outlive us. Welles takes comfort in that. F for Fake  was Welles’ last statement on authorship and art (at least until his true final film was completed more than four decades later), and its themes are likewise echoed in the final bow of Francis Ford Coppola -an entirely self-financed  high-concept, messy and metaphor-drenched epic called Megalopolis