How Had I Never Seen..."Blue Sky"?

by Nick Taylor

If you had approached me on the street and asked if I was a Jessica Lange fan, I would have answered with an emphatic “duh!” But since you clicked on this link, I'm coming to you through your screen to tell you this informatioin. Having originally met Lange in high school via the actress-heavy ordeal that is American Horror Story, watching her communicate an actual character amidst so much lurid, proudly threadbare plotting was revelatory to witness. Lange served Ryan Murphy’s baroque and sentimental grotesqueries with leonine force. Even as subsequent seasons leaned too heavily on her characters as pillars to be toppled, and it became all too easy to project Lange’s distaste towards her surroundings into her vainglorious Supreme and dissatisfied ringleader, she gives a hell of a good show, finding ways to keep herself amused and visibly gratified (or maybe relieved) to play off her talented co-stars. I haven’t touched the show in years, and still I can remember her broken line reading of “in the gloaming” as she stumbles through a crowd of patients in Asylum, her bitchy, hilarious  refusal to act like she’s invading anyone’s space when she saunters through the Murder House despite no longer owning it.

On the strength of this output I quickly searched for her star-making performances in Frances and Tootsie, which further cemented my impression of her as a supernova capable of great versatility. I’ve seen plenty of other films she’s starred in, yet as her 75th birthday approached, I realized there was a major blind spot I needed to correct. How on Earth have I not seen any of Jessica Lange’s post-1982 Oscar nominations? I’ve spent the past week pouring over those features, and though Country and Sweet Dreams are perhaps in greater need of reappraisal, I’ve found pouring over Blue Sky to be the most rewarding, and the most fun to try pinning down. So, without further ado - Happy 75th Birthday, Jessica Lange...

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How Had I Never Seen... "The Wind Rises"?

by Cláudio Alves

Hayao Miyazaki has been announcing his retirement for over a quarter century, each new project since Princess Mononoke received like a potential swan song. Such is the case of his latest flick, the enigmatic How Do You Live?, retitled The Boy and the Heron for the Anglophone market. After a lead-up to release that saw no promo beyond the poster, the film was finally seen by the Japanese public, enjoying its big opening last week. And yet, few folks are keen on sharing details about the animated project, including the narrative's basic premise. While the rest of the world waits for an opportunity to glimpse Miyazaki's latest "last" picture, it's an excellent time to watch the not-so-final career-capper that came before, which, to my great shame, I had never seen. 

This July, The Wind Rises celebrates its 10th anniversary, something worth celebrating as we prepare to see another auteur's exploration of an inventor whose efforts resulted in mass death during WWII. Not that Miyazaki's biopic of engineer Jiro Horikoshi, whose fighter designs defined Japanese air force in the 30s and 40s, is attempting the same IMAX-sized scale as Nolan's Oppenheimer…

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How Had I Never Seen..."Planes, Trains and Automobiles"

By Ben Miller

There isn't a long list of well-regarded Thanksgiving films, but John Hughes' 1987 comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles is defintely near the top of it.  It took me 30 years to catch up, but I finally have!. Featuring two pitch-perfect performances from stars Steve Martin and John Candy, the film continues to elicit laughter after all these years.

Neil Page (Martin) is an advertising executive on a business trip to New York City.  Eager to return to his family in Chicago for Thanksgiving, he attempts to hail a cab to the airport.  After losing a cab to Jake Briggs (Kevin Bacon from Hughes' She's Having a Baby) and getting extorted by a lawyer, his cab is inadvertently stolen by Del Griffith (Candy)...

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How Had I Never Seen..."Dune"?

by Cláudio Alves

Audiences are here for Denis Villeneuve's take of Frank Herbert's Dune – its first half, to be specific. Box office numbers already guaranteed the filming of its sequel, and now there are even talks of a third movie, adapting the second book in the series, Dune Messiah. As the world goes mad for spice and space twinks, Goth nuns, and more made-up sci-fi terminology than you can shake a stick at, it feels like a good time to look at the last big-screen adaptation of Herbert's genre-defining novel. While much hated by its maker, David Lynch's Dune has gained quite the cult following over the years. Indeed, researching this piece, I came across plenty of retrospective defenses of the movie's merits, passionate screeds against its maligned critical reputation.

Does the flick earn such reappraisals, or were the initial reactions right all along? Well…

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How Had I Never Seen... "Last Year at Marienbad"?

by Nick Taylor

Where to even begin with Last Year at Marienbad? In one sense, Alan Resnais’s film announces itself as a slippery, enigmatic object from its very first image. The resplendent music, equally ominous and inviting, mixes with the opening narration like they’re from the same source. Sacha Vernig’s silvery, elegant photography, gliding through the grounds of a baroque, ornate hotel and over dozens of handsome, impossibly rich guests, immediately communicates that Resnais has built a film both ephemeral and obsidian. The editing typically feeds into this gilded fluidity, save for when it disrupts those established rhythms as some other memory and breaks through an ongoing sequence like an intrusive thought to assert its own impression. The hotel itself looks glamorously assembled, yet every tree and painting have the same energy as the obelisk from 2001. The whole place feels inevitable without being easy to read.

And yet, Last Year at Marienbad isn’t obtuse about its mysteries...

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