Edited
For someone so often compared to John Ford, it is faintly surprising that Howard Hawks largely strayed away from conventional Westerns early in his career. In fact, he strayed away from conventional Westerns throughout his entire career (his two Western masterpieces, one of them our present subject and the other to come eleven years later, are hardly conventional). But he strayed from Westerns entirely for most of his early career at least. Perhaps he felt his duty lied elsewhere, perhaps he wanted to avoid the Ford comparison, or perhaps the ever-humble and straightforward, workaday director just did what he was told by the studio. For this last reason, Howard Hawks is often considered the secret auteur, or the greatest craftsperson in all of cinema, a director who favored perfection of nuts and bolts filmmaking over stylistic invention running away with his films. Continue reading
Another little temporary series here. Nothing too fancy – mostly an excuse for me to catch up on some films I haven’t seen or haven’t seen in a while. We’ll be looking at three classical Hollywood filmmakers over time: Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Billy Wilder, visiting each once in the annus mirabilis of classical cinema, 1939, when they were all still (relatively) young, again in the late ’40s and early ’50s at the middle of their careers (and the middle of classical Hollywood’s career), and finally when things were waning for each director and for classical Hollywood in general in the early ’60s, before the new school American New Wave would wreck up the joint. 
Another little temporary series here. Nothing too fancy – mostly an excuse for me to catch up on some films I haven’t seen or haven’t seen in a while. We’ll be looking at three classical Hollywood filmmakers over time: Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Billy Wilder, visiting each once in the annus mirabilis of classical cinema, 1939, when they were all still (relatively) young, again in the late ’40s and early ’50s at the middle of their careers (and the middle of classical Hollywood’s career), and finally when things were waning for each director and for classical Hollywood in general in the early ’60s, before the new school American New Wave would wreck up the joint. 
In honor of the thick, physical, downpouring heat of the August Summer nights upon us, the sorts of nights where (quoting Thelma Ritter) rain doesn’t cool anything down, but simply makes the heat wet, I decided to tackle two films from the all time literary master of making the heat feel so wet you can drown in it: Tennessee Williams. 
In honor of the thick, physical, downpouring heat of the August Summer nights upon us, the sorts of nights where (quoting Thelma Ritter) rain doesn’t cool anything down, but simply makes the heat wet, I decided to tackle two films from the all time literary master of making the heat feel so wet you can drown in it: Tennessee Williams. 
The trouble with Minions, the third film in the abnormally successful and assumedly long-living franchise from Illumination Entertainment, is that it kind of works. Moments of whimsy abound, from a charmingly amateurish claymation fable to a breathless opening act as the family of ruler-less assistants, the Minions, hurtle from evil owner to evil owner and helplessly (and accidentally) murder them all. There is a scabrous anti-Disney (and, admittedly, anti-Southern United States) dig that paints Orlando, Florida (home of Disneyland) as a crumbling, lateral murk of weeping swampland sans human activity. 
Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man is a surprisingly fleet-footed, dexterous little film when it wants to be. The troubled production, with the film written by British screwballs Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End, Scott Pilgrim) and Joe Cornish (Attack the Block) with Wright planned to direct, ended with Wright leaving the film over concerns about its need to fit in with the Marvel universe. Adam McKay and star Paul Rudd rewrote the screenplay to make it more accessible, and the journeyman Reed took over directing. The film leaves no doubt that Wright’s version would have prevailed (not spectacularly so, but still more than your average Marvel film) but enough of that manic British deadpan is retained to cheer the film up a little beyond the usually grim, dour Marvel attempts (see Avengers 2) to layer self-serious gravity onto their flicks. Comparatively, Ant-Man is a chipper, domestic, even lightweight affair that benefits from never raising the stakes too high. 
Brad Bird’s Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol was a film with a, well, impossible mission (I couldn’t resist), but like the franchise’s main-man Ethan Hunt (always played by the charismatic and respectably committed Tom Cruise), it approached the mission like a challenge and went so far as to bask in the impossibility of it. Before 2011, the franchise had two outright duds and one competent action film, all vehicles for their respective director’s chosen style. Certainly, Brian De Palma was the most interesting of those directors, but his cynical stylistic demeanor was a poor, compromised fit for a fluffy action pic uninterested in seriously enveloping De Palma’s darker tendencies. The resulting film was a mess, and the two action-first follow-ups were hamstrung by general idiocy (the first sequel) and questionable directing (the second follow-up). 
There’s a secretive, furtive film of superior quality lying in wait within Dope, but I’m not sure that discovering it would be a unilateral good. The current film’s capricious, mercurial demeanor and generally fractious tonal imbalances are as much a selling point as a weakness. The essence of the primary flaw – the film’s deliberately adolescent, unformed habit of rushing from spot to spot whilst only backhandedly debating with the depths of its implication of adulthood – is itself a restive encapsulation of the mindset of its teenage characters. Like those teenagers, it isn’t really invested in the darker caverns of its material, and it often errantly wanders into regions of interest before jogging off into more fleeting segments of comedy that are, if rough, cheerfully so at the least. It benefits from a learning-the-ropes abandon that necessarily implies a better film lies waiting within, desperate to get out and never really finding the limelight. But Rick Famuyiwa’s film is operating on its own wavelength, which happens to be tripping back and forth between every wavelength it can find, and that freefloating, jejune quality is not without its own charms. 
Directed by David Wain and written by Wain and Michael Showalter, 2001’s Wet Hot American Summer is one of the few legitimate “cult classics” to have emerged post-2000. Sure, we’re always discovering new “old” films from the gutters and cemeteries of cinema history, some via revelatory re-releases or the increasingly miniscule parade of independent theaters pining for midnight screening success to fight the corporate behemoths of Big Theater. But a modern film that has emerged as a cult classic? Now that is a rarity, largely because most of the modern films we identify as cult classics don’t meaningfully fit the term. People can introduce the likes of Anchorman and The Big Lebowski within the halls of “cult classics” all they want, but that doesn’t change the obvious box office success of both films relative to their budgets. Calling them “cult” films only applies if “seemingly all Americans between the ages of 18 and 35” meaningfully qualifies as a “cult”. 
The Long Take 