Scraps on Cinema

A work of historical fiction set amid the 1984 U.S. presidential election, The Last Thing He Wanted is adapted by director Dee Rees and co-writer Marco Villalobos from the 1996 Joan Didion novel of the same name. It sees a sidelined, muckraking journalist (Anne Hathaway) abdicating the campaign trail in order to help her gun-running father (Willem Dafoe) out of a jam. In the process, she's marooned in Costa Rica, and runs afoul with the various clandestine parties in the American empire's subversive, reactionary missions in the southern hemisphere. The juxtaposition of high melodrama and historical intrigue pushes the film's already convoluted plot to ludicrous extremes. But that manner of its dramatization is also the only interesting thing about the latest from Rees, her previous films being  Pariah  (2011), Bessie  (2015), and Mudbound  (2017, also distributed through Netflix). All of these films are far more narratively straightforward, so Rees' expe...

For every prestige picture or blockbuster that swallows up the discourse on diversity and representation in the commercial film industry, there's an un-bespoken retinue of also-rans made by those who are just humbly hecking out their filmmaking careers. Stella Meghie, a Canadian-born writer-director, has three pictures already under her belt, her best yet known being the young-adult romantic drama Everything, Everything  (2017). Her latest is  The Photograph , another romance, this one starring Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield as a formulaic pair of professional urban middle-class lovers whose brief fire risks being snuffed out by the calls of career opportunity and their  own personally guarded natures. Both of them photographers, the archivist Mae and the journalist Michael's bittersweet love affair is juxtaposed with the story of Mae's late mother, a photographer in her own right, whose own ambition and drive tragically pull her away from closeness, both as...

Let's just take a moment to acknowledge the obvious: As far as these major studio superhero movies go, the production and cinematography on display in Birds of Prey  continues the comparably impressive streak in Warner Bros.' catalogue. It's not as oddly evocative as your Joker , or as operatic as your Batman v Superman  - but it is far and away a perfect synthesis of cynical brand tie-in wallpaper and prestige film theatricality. It's a reminder that these cape-man serials, originally on Hollywood's B-list, are now the equivalent of its great musicals events, or its prestige historical and Biblical epics. It's frankly disappointing, then, when the filmmakers paper over the musical potential they broach. A femdom reproduction of the "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" number from Gentlemen Wear Blondes  will get short-circuited as just another one of crazy clown lady Harley Quinn's traumatic inserts. A similarly marquee-lit, "POSTMO...

Released in 2003 to modest success, Bad Boys II  seemingly only attained a kind of special infamy in pop culture and pop culture discourse after British comedy darling Edgar Wright payed homage to it with his 2007 film  Hot Fuzz . Before that, it was the first box office misfire in director Michael Bay's career. His previous frenetically maximalist action films --  The Rock  (1996), Armageddon  (1998), Pearl Harbor  (2001) -- had all done gangbusters. Bad Boys II  was the first financial disappointment from the old new bad boy of the Hollywood 90's and his frequent producing partner, Jerry Bruckheimer. When Bay's follow-up, the Ewan McGregor-Scarlett Johansson sci-fi romance The Island  (2005), also bit the monetary dust, to many of the commercial film industry's trade journalists and reviewers and financiers, it must have seemed like the light of the blockbuster wunderkind  had faded with the rather brief but peak period where his cinem...