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robertvaughn
Reviews
Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022)
Visually ugly yet fascinating
On a visual and editorial level, Winning Time is a disaster. In every...single...scene, moment by moment, they inexplicably switch the film stock around (quasi-16mm to quasi-super 8mm to camcorder video) and the editor jumps from shot to shoot, constantly crossing the 180 line, at times making the geography and spatial relations confusing...often in a room with just two characters talking! It might be one of the ugliest shows I've ever seen.
However, somehow, some way, it's worth watching, primarily for a few terrific performances (and I do mean a few...there are some performances that are straight up awful...Jason Clarke, looking at you, pal) and pretty sharp writing. John C. Reilly is phenomenal as Jerry Buss, effortlessly oscillating between charming, bloviating opportunist, to an overwhelmed, neurotic hustler who's in over his head. And Quincy Isaiah as Magic Johnson is a revelation. He truly captures Magic's eternal optimism and charisma and childlike naïveté, as well as convincingly conveying both his brashness and vanity and inner struggle. As a huge Magic fan, this portrayal is both unexpected and more than welcome.
Overall, despite the show's baffling directorial decisions, unpleasant cinematography, and catastrophic editing, the writers and actors have been able to hook the audience in with complex characters and an intriguing look behind the scenes that offer a lot of insight.
Not great, not very good, but entertaining and sometimes compelling.
Where the Wild Things Are (2009)
Where the Wild Things Are - Extraordinary
A beautiful, audacious, roughly-hewn motion picture (adjectives that are no doubt overused in describing the picture's modus operandi), Spike Jonze's adaptation Maurice Sendak's adored children's book "Where the Wild Things Are" taps into the innocent, volatile world of a 9 year old boy the way few mainstream feature films have. It is original, unique, melancholy, and because of this several mainstream critics (and even lucid critics like Salon's Stephanie Zacharek) have derided the film. "There's no story"; "kids won't like it"; "it's an adult film about children, not a children's film"; "it's boring"; "the pacing is slow"...
What? Why did it become such a crime to make an abstract art film within the spineless confines of the Hollywood system? Doesn't Spike Jonze get credit for personalizing, therefore, retaining a substantial amount of voracity while delving into one of the most revered children's books of the last fifty years? What the hell is wrong with that? I understand that some people just don't respond to the abstract, pseudo-verisimilitude of pretentious art films, but there's a stripped-down purity to this picture that cannot be denied. It's not pretentious, but emotional and honest.
It's bold, it takes chances...why is it being chastised in the media? How often do we get movies like "Where the Wild Things Are"? It should be celebrated, not snidely dismissed (Ex. Lou Lumenick, NY Post).