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Filtering by Tag: Steven Spielberg
Callum Turner, Austin Butler, and a B-17. (Apple TV+)
With seven years as an editor for Air & Space / Smithsonian, may it rest in power, under my belt, I was the only man for the job of telling you which real American historical figures are played by real English and Irish actors. My Vulture recaps of Masters of the Air, showrunner John Orloff’s long-delayed Apple TV+ adaptation of Donald L. Miller’s nonfiction history book, are here.
Hayley Podschun, Alexandra Frohlinger, Christian Thompson and Rhett Guter in Arena’s revised-but-still unsatisfying Catch Me If You Can. (Margot Schulman)
Catch Me If You Can, the Hairspray songwriters’ attempt to musicalize Steven Spielberg’s beloved 2002 film, didn’t take off on Broadway 11 years ago. The revised version now at Arena Stage doesn’t work, either. For the Washington City Paper.
Chris Pratt, velociraptor whisperer. (Universal)
Here's my review of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. And below you can hear Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson, and Glen Weldon discuss the movie and its place in the Jurassic-iad with me in the fourth chair. I regret that it never occurred to me to refer to this film as Jurassic 5 even though "Sum of Us" is an all-timer shadowboxing jam. I also regret that none of us, not even Thompson, thought to mention the moment in Jurassic 5 when it seems like Ted Levine from The Silence of the Lambs is about to start singing "See My Vest." You'll know the one I mean.
The Nice Guys, which I expect history shall remember as my favorite film of the summer of 2016, came out last week; Captain America: Civil War, probably the best of the Marvel bunch, is old news. But Memorial Day weekend is still the traditional start of the summer movie season. Here, for the third consecutive Memorial Day weekend, is my Village Voice list of summer movies I want to see. Light up a phone in any of these and you'll hear from me.
Enjoy those X-Men, everybody! I'll be observing the holiday at the AFI, taking in Spartacus in its 212-minute entirety.
“Radical Decency” might be a fancy new name for the old-timey philosophy governing Bridge of Spies, Steven Spielberg’s earnest, burnished, thoroughly gripping account of a notable episode of Cold War diplomacy. Compressing events that unfolded between 1957 and 1962, the film is primarily about the relationship between Manhattan insurance lawyer James B. Donovan and Rudolf Abel, née Col. Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher, the Soviet spy he was court-appointed to represent.
Though reluctant to accept Abel’s case, Donovan defends his client with more zeal than anybody, including the judge, wants, on the grounds that it’s the only way to show the world that innocent-until-proven-guilty American justice is superior to its totalitarian Soviet counterpart. Though unable to persuade a jury of Abel’s innocence, Donovan persuades the judge to spare his life—leaving the U.S. with a bargaining chip when C.I.A. pilot Francis Gary Powers’ top-secret U-2 spyplane is shot down over Soviet territory and Powers is captured three years later. Appreciating that Donovan foresaw the need for a captive to trade, the C.I.A. dispatches him to freshly walled-off East Berlin to try to negotiate Powers’ release in exchange for Abel.
Read MoreAmrish Puri rips out the heart of mainstream cinema in 1984's Temple of Doom.
To wrap up The Dissolve's Movie of the Week examination of Joe Dante's Gremlins, Keith Phipps asked me to write a reflection on the PG-13, the lukewarm rating introduced in the summer of 1984 in response to the outcry that greeted the PG-rated Gremlins' violence and darkness, as well as that of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, released two weeks earlier. I was honored to oblige.
A surprising, random fact of which I was unaware: Gremlins, a horror comedy and the fourth-highest grossing film of 1984, was released the very same day as that year's second-biggest hit, Ivan Reitman's horror comedy Ghostbusters. That would never happen now, and yet apparently it didn't hurt either of those films back then. Neither of them could out-earn Beverly Hills Cop, however. The fact an R-rated action comedy was the biggest hit of the year is another reminder of how much Hollywood has changed in a generation-and-a-half.
