Onwards and Upwards!
Try as I might to watch less television, Derek Cianfrance, Wally Lamb, and Ruffalo’s mini-series I Know This Much Is True has been too good to pass up. The series is based on Lamb’s novel of the same title about two Connecticut brothers and their shared family history and traumas. In the series adapted and …
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I will be pleasantly surprised if I end up liking any new film I see this year as much as I liked Clark Duke’s comic thriller Arkansas. The film, adapted from John Brandon’s novel of the same title, is sad, funny, smart, and very unpredictable. I went into the film knowing very little so I’ll …
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Viewers expecting a traditional biopic of one Al Capone will likely be disappointed with director Josh Trank’s largely plotless and episodic film Capone (which originally had the stronger title Fonzo), but fans of the actor Tom Hardy and mood movies might find a lot to enjoy. For Fonzo very much is a fever dream film. …
I’ve taken a break from blogging because I mainly blog about films, and I’ve been trying to watch LESS films and television shows because so many are violent and conflict-driven. During quarantine, I’ve been reading the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha, Living Christ and his The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching. In both …
I was late to Kevin MacDonald’s gritty and sad 2014 submarine film Black Sea. The film came out right around the time critics were started to realize that Jude Law might make a fine character actor, now that his peak years of stardom had passed and his hairline had receded. In the film, Law plays …
Last night I watched Shane Black’s buddy comedy The Nice Guys for the first time since I watched it in a Detroit theater in the summer of 2016. The film holds up so nicely (I’ll try to avoid that word as much as I can) that I was half tempted to rewatch it a second …
Published last year, Maura Spiegel’s Sidney Lumet: A Life is an absolutely first-rate biography. It is probably the strongest single director biography I’ve ever read and definitely one of the best showbiz biographies I’ve come across. The book is heavily researched, provides astute analysis of Lumet’s work and personal life, and Spiegel does a fine …
The name of this blog should really be “I Was Late” because as with most of the works I write about I was late to Ari Aster’s folk horror film Midsummer (released last year). Like with Aster’s first film, Hereditary, Midsommar is best experienced with as little known about it as possible. The start of …
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Probably one of the most criminally misunderstood comic book movies, Venom is a brilliant B-movie that knows it is a B-movie and isn’t taken very seriously by its creators. Tom Hardy plays Eddie Brock, a San Francisco news reporter who is a bit of a slob, very arrogant, dishonest, disloyal, and has no friends. This …
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I was late to Starz’s two season series Counterpart, which began back in 2017. The show’s premise itself isn’t exceptional, but a lot of exceptional work is built off it. In the series, a second reality is created or discovered through a physics experiment in Berlin circa 1989. In the present, a hangdog worker bee …
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Aden Thomas Jordan