Greed Onward (This Week’s Movies)

Steve Coogan: Greed (Sony Pictures Classics)

Links to my reviews published this week in the Herald, and etc.

Onward. “Pixar has given the world many indelible images since the first Toy Story movie in 1995. I guess we can add ‘the gelatinous cube’ to the list.”

Greed. “Coogan, one of the world’s leading experts in conveying fatuousness, is very comfortable here. With his perma-tan and blindingly whitened teeth, he’s a walking advertisement for narcissism.”

Do join us at Scarecrow Academy on Saturday, March 7, for a session devoted to Howard Hawks’s 1951 classic The Thing from Another World. The theme for this semester is “The Art in Horror: Horror and the Director,” and the event is free. That’s 2 p.m., Scarecrow Video.

My blog post for the Scarecrow website this week is a look back at Michael Winterbottom’s 1999 film Wonderland; the director’s new one, Greed, opens this weekend. Read it here.

More 1980s reviews this week at What a Feeling!: Roland Joffe’s Fat Man and Little Boy, the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona, Fred Schepisi’s Roxanne, and James Ivory’s A Room with a View.

Brave Grassroots Lincoln (Weekly Links)

“…Shall not perish from the Earth. Now watch me while I hit this drive.”

Links to reviews I wrote for the Herald and etc.

Brave. “Skillful.”

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. “Some clever ideas running around here, albeit in terrible taste.”

Grassroots. “The siren call of a quixotic quest.”

Lost Bohemia. “What good is history if you can’t make money from it?”

On KUOW’s “Weekday,” I talk with Steve Scher about actors who take certain roles as career corrections, bids to get back in audience favor, a la Tom Cruise in Rock of Ages. The piece is archived here; the movie widget begins at the 20:20 mark.

Catching up with a few What a Feeling! entries, we find vintage Eighties reviews of Jeannot Szwarc’s Supergirl, J. Lee Thompson’s Charles Bronson vehicle The Evil That Men Do, and Luc Besson’s Subway.

R.I.P. Andrew Sarris, without whom writing about movies would look very different. More to come. Update: Film Comment magazine has added some online reminscences, including my memory of Sarris’s visit to Seattle to deliver a very memorable lecture in March 1987. The pieces are here, and feature Kent Jones, Glenn Kenny, Geoffrey O’Brien, and Phillip Lopate (and might add more).