Steve McQueen-a-palooza: Bullitt (1968)

title: Bullitt (warner)

director: Peter Yates

starring: Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Duvall

one sentence or less: even though it’s a bit dated, few films are better at showcasing how cool Steve McQueen is.

Steve McQueen-a-palooza.

After having just completed a recent viewing of the great late 60s film Bullit, I’ve decided to go on a Steve McQueen kick. A Steve McQueen-athon, if you will. And I will. Starting tomorrow the site will be updated (regularly, I promise) with one Steve McQueen film a week for the next month or two. All the big ones get a fair shake. It’s a great excuse to watch “The Towering Inferno,” which is always a treat.

Review: Up in the Air

title: Up in the Air (Paramount)

director: Jason Reitman

starring: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman

one sentence or less: Another shiny piece of middling faux independent filmmaking from overhyped writer/director Jason Reitman.

Review: The Squid and the Whale

Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale arrived with great fanfare when it was released in 2005. Critics hailed it. Audiences adored it. Well, those that saw it did. Baumbach was the toast of critic’s circles, the Independent Spirit Awards and the Golden Globes, and the film wound up on over 200 Top Ten Lists. Or so the DVD case claims. When I saw it way back when, I felt conflicted about it. There was something about it that was undeniably appealing, but it was also an undeniably flawed piece. When revisiting it this past week those flaws came bubbling to the surface.

Review: The Visitor

originally published in the middlebury campus

April is lame. I’m sorry if you have some kind of attachment to April, but it sucks. The weather is always lousy. The ground is always vaguely brown and always a bit wet. The skiing is only good for the first weekend or two. Most importantly, there is never anything good in the way of movie releases. I mean, let’s just take a look at what was released this past April: Fast and Furious, Knowing, and The Haunting in Connecticut all had their illustrious debuts that month. See what I mean? April is lame. But, if you find yourself unable to go outside and have a few free minutes might I suggest checking out a wonderful film that passed a lot of people by when it was released last April (the exception to the ‘April is lame’ rule), Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor.

Review: The Fall

originally published in the middlebury campus

Every now and then people need escape. No matter how stress-free your life is, an hour and a half of fantasy is necessary to ensure emotional and psychological health. That being said, fantasy and escape don’t need to be mindless. Jerry Bruckheimer doesn’t have the market cornered on escapism with pithy one-liners, half hearted romance, and over the top bombast. Recent years have proven that adult-oriented fantasy can combine escapist entertainment with intelligence, and The Fall is a perfect example of just that kind of fantastical escape.

Review: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

originally published in the middlebury campus

Spring time brings a mixed bag to movie theaters. There is rarely the over the top bombast that one finds during the summer, the introspective independent films that usual see the light of day toward the end of the fall, or even the laughably terrible films that are released in January or February. The spring usually finds films popping up in cineplexes that are too unimpressive to see release at any other time, which usually means nothing worth spending time on is gracing our local theaters. This is actually a blessing in disguise because it can afford one the opportunity to go back and check out films that might have slipped by during their theatrical run and are now being released on DVD. One of the films that slipped past most people when it had its initial shot in theaters this past September was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Review: Smart People

originally published in the middlebury campus

The marketing team at Miramax touted their release, Smart People as being a creation “from the makers of Sideways.” I loved Sideways so this little marketing ploy was enough to ensnare me. The problem is that when they said, “from the makers of Sideways” what they really meant was “from the producer of Sideways and also staring Thomas Hayden Church.” Well, if a studio chooses to market their film like this they are inevitably going to invite comparisons and the truth is that Smart People doesn’t hold a candle to Sideways.

Review: Paranoid Park

originally published in the middlebury campus

This first paragraph is going to be a bit pretentious, but bear with me. Movie titles are an important forum from which audiences can gleam information about a film; the story, a genre, or simply a mood can be pulled out of the title. It helps audiences know what they’re getting into. Every now and then, however, a film comes along whose title says more about the film’s themes than its plot; a title that retroactively seems to tell audience more about the film than reading a dozen reviews. Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park is just such a title, at once saying nothing about the film, but also evoking the youthful isolation, guilt and paranoia that are the film’s core themes. It’s a subtle feature of the film, but then again the strongest features of Paranoid Park is its amazing subtlety and the quiet grace with which it tries to capture the interior of the characters that populate it’s setting.

Review: Eyes Wide Shut

originally published in the middlebury campus

I reviewed films for the Middlebury Campus for about a year and a half. While I held the post people asked for my favorite film on a weekly basis. I get the impression that people ask this of all film majors as well, but I also get the impression that the deadly combination of critic and student makes this question come up more often for me than some others. I’ve never had a ready answer for people, to what I self-centeredly see as their disappointment. I vaguely considered reviewing a new movie for my last column; I mean, X-Men: Wolverine did come out that week. But, in the end, I decided that I didn’t want to end my time as The Campus film critic writing about some Hollywood blockbuster; instead I wanted to answer the oft-asked aforementioned question. Well, here is my potentially surprising answer: Stanley Kubrick’s last film, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut is my favorite film.