Among the current decade’s crop of movie neo-musicals, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land stands apart for tapping into traditions uniquely native to film. That is to say, it’s a song-and-dance extravaganza […]
Bye Bye Birdie, George Sidney’s candy-colored adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, arrived in theaters on the eve of pivotal moments in the histories of both the musical genre in […]
The height of my political idealism (or naïveté, as you please) was around the year 2015. Amid all the usual rancor, I felt optimistic that things could improve. One of […]
From the beginning, rock music was pitched toward the young. The generational schisms opened early and often, with teenagers eager to assert cultural power like never before. Rock may have […]
On Conjunctiva There Is a Word in Every Language for Every Other Language
The Introduction It was a full ten years from this movie’s original release before I finally sat down and watched it beginning to end. Catching up with it was a […]
The Introduction Around the beginning of this decade, there were a few young American filmmakers whom I followed with great interest. One of them was Jason Reitman, whose Juno and Up in […]
The film’s marketing tagline — “You’ll believe a man can fly” — and first four words of dialogue — “This is no fantasy” — make the interpretive approach to 1978’s Superman […]
Through nearly thirty years of filmmaking, guided by the hands of six different directors, Studio Ghibli has exhibited a remarkable consistency of purpose. Each film speaks to a nation experiencing […]
Thirty years ago, veteran animators Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata joined forces to open a film studio. The goal was to raise the artistic standards of animation in Japan. This […]
Geppetto's Clocks 