Here’s a re-hash of HE’s best 2011 films along with the also-rans and stinkers…if you assemble the best (10), the very goods (16) and the generally approved (23), the tally comes to 49….a damn good year! HE’s 10 Best of 2011 (in this order): Moneyball, A Separation, The Descendants, Miss Bala, Drive, Contagion, Win Win, … Read more
As a director, Angelina Jolie has been repeatedly drawn to stories about savage brutality visited upon innocent protagonists. Over the last 11 years she’s made four films in this vein. They are In The Land of Blood & Honey (’11) — Serbs brutalizing Bosnian Muslims. Unbroken (’14) — Japanese soldiers brutalizing American POWs. First They … Read more
I’ve just come out of Angelina Jolie’s latest innocents-being-tortured film, called First They Killed My Father. I saw it this afternoon at the Chuck Jones. Yes, totalitarian brutality is very bad. But it’s also kinda bad when all you do is bludgeon your audience with depictions of same, over and over and over and over. I … Read more
Angelina Jolie is on the cover of this month’s Vanity Fair, which is either her ninth or tenth. A VF cover used to be a fairly big deal — now it’s like “uh-huh, okay.” I’ve mentioned twice before that as a director with the ability to choose her own projects, Jolie has demonstrated a preference … Read more
A rhetorical, non-litigious claim is being made by author James J. Braddock (a.k.a. Josep K. Knezevic) that Angelia Jolie used the basic plot bones of his book, The Soul Shattering, in her script of In The Land of Blood Honey, an upcoming Serb-Bosnian war drama that she’s directed. Angelina Jolie directing In The Land of … Read more
On 10.21 Matt Walsh posted a video essay about the last peak period of movies (’06 through ’08) and the all-but-total disappearance of our shared American monoculture. I think Walsh was a bit off in his timeline. We still had a vibrant monoculture in 2011. An HE article I came across today proves this. Here’s … Read more
In the thread for yesterday’s Angelina Jolie hit piece, HE’s own Bobby Peru wrote the following: “Quit sucking Brad Pitt’s small dick long enough to be objective. You obviously know nothing about [Jolie’s] parenting style or who she is as a person. You’re just obsessed with Mr. Movie Star. That’s your entire game here. From … Read more
World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy is polling critics on the five best films of 2021. HE’s favorite film of the year thus far, hands down, is Thomas Anders Jensen’s Riders of Justice: A truly original stand-out with a deliciously skewed, deadpan sense of humor. On 5.21 I insisted that violence wasn’t funny or certainly couldn’t … Read more
Jasmila Zbanić‘s Quo Vadis, Aida? has been kicking around since last September’s Venice Film Festival, where it premiered. I finally saw it this morning, and I knew within five or ten it was a thumbs-upper. It’s a blistering, horrifying, you-are-there account of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre — 8000 Bosnian men and boys murdered in cold … Read more
As noted on 2.3.17, Angelina Jolie‘s First They Killed My Father (Netflix, undated release) chronicles the experience of author Loung Ung’s early childhood in Cambodia during the Pol Pot regime’s genocide of the late ’70s and early ’80s. It’s her third film about horrific punishment and torture visited upon innocents by hostile governments, the first … Read more
Angelina Jolie‘s First They Killed My Father (Netflix, likely spring release) is based upon Luong Ung’s 16-year-old book of the same name. It seems to be basically a back-to-the-Killing Fields piece about the Khymer Rouge Cambodian genocide of the mid to late ’70s. Pic will chronicle Loung Ung’s “early childhood in Cambodia as a five-year-old … Read more
I don’t know if Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken (Universal, 12.25), which everyone saw Sunday afternoon at the WGA theatre on Doheny, will nab a Best Picture nomination or not, although it could. It’s very well crafted. I can honestly call it admirable, grade-A filmmaking. Anyone would. And it comes straight from Angie’s heart and innards so … Read more