REVIEWS IN BRIEF: AUGUST, 2015

I mentioned some while back that going forward, there were going to be a lot of shorter reviews popping up, and going forward, I hope to make these posts happen weekly - biweekly for sure. But it's been a bad month for watching things, so this first capsule review round-up is going to stand instead as the collection of all the things I watched in the month of August that I thought I wanted to talk about in some capacity. Bonus: this means, now and...

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ON PTERRY

Once upon a time, I pledged in a very idle way that I'd like to share my thoughts about Terry Pratchett, an author whose books I uniformly enjoyed and frequently adored. And I never did it, because of laziness and fear of mission drift (film critics critiquing prose? Anarchy!), though every now and then one reader or another would bring it up (and one reader in particular, whose enthusiasm for the prospect of knowing what I had to say on the matter, kept it alive in my head almost constantly for most of the last ten years). There'd always be time...

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TO BECOME IMMORTAL AND THEN DIE

A review requested by Ryan J, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 debut feature and declaration of war Breathless* is a curious case. In hindsight, everything that is most daring about it would be repeated to stronger effect in more interesting movies overall by the same director - most directly in Band of Outsiders and Pierrot le fou, though almost everything he made...

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THE FROZEN NORTH

A review requested by Scott, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.We live in an age when anime - an imprecise term that I try not to use very often, since it doesn't inherently mean anything besides "animation made in Japan", which strikes me as condescending at least, but let's not get bogged down in that kind of aside just yet - I say again, an age in which anime is pretty well understood...

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DO YOU WANNA KNOW A SECRET?

A second review requested by Zev Burrows, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.In his two-volume collection of lyrics and personal recollections, Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat, Stephen Sondheim acknowledges that among his impressive corpus of skills, the ability to construct a dramatic narrative has eluded him. He has been blessed with strong collaborators to write the books...

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BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: THE LIVES OF RAPPERS

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Straight Outta Compton is a full-on biopic of N.W.A., the world's most dangerous group. Rather than visit one of history's other rap biopics - because they're pretty much all dreadful - let's take a peek at something of a freer, more impressionistic...

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BEST SHOT: ANGELS IN AMERICA

For the final-but-not-actually episode of Hit Me with Your Best Shot in 2015, Nathaniel has picked an old subject, one that I didn't follow along with at the time: 2003's Angels in America, the HBO production of Tony Kushner's monumental 1993 play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and a late masterwork in the increasingly spotty career of director Mike Nichols.The original play was presented in two parts, "Millennium Approaches"...

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