Before movies had sound, which actors have now come to use to great effect for conjuring strong emotional reactions from their audiences, performances on film were essentially a mime act. So they relied heavily on body language for performers to communicate things. But unlike the vaudeville-type acts you’d see on stage at the time, silent movies could get right in tight on a person’s face, where the most subtle and expressive movements of a person’s face could be captured and projected for all to see, as if they were right next to the person. This was a pretty big deal. And it didn’t take long for people to realize that the most interesting thing to focus on in an actor on film was in those windows to the soul themselves, the performer’s eyes.
Discussions and debates over the greatest movie directors of all time are rarely fruitful. The criteria for what makes a good filmmaker, hell a good artist, is so wide ranging and abstract that to try to name a batch the deserve the label of “the best” is a bit of a fool’s errand. It’s a bit like asking who is the greatest human being of all time. What do you base it on?
I’m curious to what extent individual viewers’ responses to Man of Steel correlate with their opinions of director Zack Snyder’s previous work. The director has yet to make a movie that people can agree on—even Sucker Punch, his most universally derided work, is seeing a slight resurgence in positive appraisal. He makes movies with bravado, a confidence that could be easily interpreted as arrogance, and this commitment to bold projects and grand visions is exactly the type of ambitious filmmaking that turns off large portions of audiences while exciting others who can’t wait to see what he’ll come up with next.
After Earth has been surprisingly divisive among reviewers and audiences, with opinions ranging from those who consider it a pleasantly entertaining bit of filmmaking from maligned director M. Night Shyamalan to those who have declared it in step with his recent string of duds and possibly the worst movie of 2013 so far. I understand both of these views to an extent. I found it to be something of an improvement over outright disasters like The Happening and Lady in the Water, in that I didn’t hate every single second of it. In fact, I found it to be mildly enjoyable, which surprised me coming from Shyamalan and the relatively untested starpower of Jaden Smith. There was a decent number of things in the film to admire.
I have to admit, I’m more surprised than usual about the reaction to Man of Steel. Most of the time critical responses to highly anticipated movies are somewhat predictable; The Great Gatsby is going to generate a lot of bile, as is anything from M. Night Shyamalan, and people will be pleased even just with the fact that there are new installments of the Fast and Furious and Star Trek franchises. I expected anything with Christopher Nolan’s name attached to it would be a guaranteed home run. At the very least, I thought reactions would range from “good” to “Dark Knight good.”
Now I know if you’re reading this that means you come to We Got This Covered for the breadth and depth of coverage this site and its talented writers and reviewers offer any movie fan. Well done! You have excellent taste. But the greatest beauty and usefulness of our internet age is the seemingly limitless number of perspectives at one’s fingertips, and so there’s always more to read, watch and listen to if you want to expand your own perspective and learn and think and all of that. So there’s always more film critics and voices worth checking out.
Scientology has become a bit of a punching bag over the last decade, thanks largely to lampooners like the South Park guys and numerous damning accounts of defectors from the church, including Academy Award-winning writer-director Paul Haggis. It has become one of those eccentric communities people assume Hollywood is full of, with some high-profile celebrity involvement and the assumption that most movie stars have at least dabbled in the self-help religion Scientology promotes itself as. It’s understandable that in a world plagued by epistemic closure like Hollywood is, it’s as if there’s a bubble around Los Angeles that surprisingly few celebrities venture outside of, something that seems bizarre to the rest of us would seem normal and enticing. Even hearing stars in interviews talk about Scientology, a sizeable number will treat it as if it was something they considered but ultimately had no use for, rather than speaking of it as a harmful cult.
If the continued popularity of lists like this one is any indication, people are still discovering jokes from the first three seasons of Arrested Development ten years after it first started airing. The show was so full of obscure references, lines too quick or subtle to take note of, and details that take multiple viewings to really click in your mind that it was impossible to appreciate just how much comedy was hidden in its many layers. It’s why watching it over and over again, sharing your observations and favorite moments with fellow watchers, was immensely rewarding.
Multiple review outlets have reached the conclusion that the new fourth season of Arrested Development, which follows a nearly decade-long absence, was a misfire, a failure to match the heights of the series’ previous three seasons. Several of these reviewers have reached this conclusion without actually reaching the conclusion of the season—they were meeting deadlines for their various publications and didn’t have time to get through the whole thing, which wasn’t released for critics in advance.
You may not know you know who James Badge Dale is, but you probably know who James Badge Dale is, in the same way you probably know who Stephen Tobolowsky, William Fichtner, Richard Jenkins, Gary Cole, and JK Simmons all are, even if the names don’t look familiar at all. Every now and then an actor will show up in a movie or TV show that you happen to be watching, and you’re think to yourself that he looks vaguely familiar. Then you see him in the next thing you watch and you’re like ok, who the hell is this guy!
