Cláudio's Best Shot Pick: Happy Together (1997)

The next episode of our series, 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot,' arrives Thursday night. Since the Cannes Film Festival is around the corner, it's focused on Wong Kar Wai's Happy Together, which screened at the Croisette 25 years ago. You still have time to participate! Here's Cláudio's entry.

In film criticism, few expressions vex me more than the old "style over substance" adage. To presuppose the audiovisual stylings of any picture should be subordinate to its text, thus taking for granted that true depth exists only in narrative rather than form, is a fundamental misunderstanding of cinema as an art. Such matters come to mind because the works of Wong Kar Wai represent one of the best counterpoints to these erroneous wisdoms. The director's style is indissociable from whatever meaning, narrative, or emotion the viewer can take from his films. That is especially true of Happy Together, one of his masterpieces and one of my all-time favorite pictures…

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Best Shot schedule - join us!

"Hit Me With Your Best Shot" season 8 is well under way Consider it like a weekly film club and join us so we continue... 

1) watch the movie
2) pick your favourite shot (whatever you think is "best" however you would define that)
3) post it, with or without an explanation wherever you play online #bestshot
4) see our own choice right here and discuss!

In this case it's truly the more the merrier. Schedule and previous episode index are after the jump... 

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Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Spider-Man 2 (2004)

by Nathaniel R

With Sam Raimi's take on Doctor Strange new in theaters, we chose his earlier superhero film Spider-Man 2 (2004) as this week's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" subject. While Raimi directed all three of the original Spider-Man films, Cláudio was right to suggest that the second film could well be considered a "platonic ideal for what superhero movies should be". When the film first opened in 2004 I saw it twice on opening weekend, something I hadn't done since I was a teenager. Not coincidentally it made me feel like a little kid again, pouring over comic books. It was a kind of pop bliss seeing Spider-Man come to life in such a wonderfully judged adventurous, romantic, and thrilling movie. Though that kind of magic has long become normalized, Spider-Man 2 is still a thrill.

Revisiting it was fun though quite surprising in three specific ways...

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Cláudio's Best Shot Pick: Spider-Man 2 (2004)

The next episode of our series, 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot,' arrives tomorrow. It's focused on Spider-Man 2. Here's Cláudio's entry.

Before the plague times we're living in, it was my annual tradition to celebrate my birthday by going to the movies. Indeed, way back in 2004, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 was the picture that marked the occasion of my 10th birthday. It was love at first sight. While the first Spidey flick was good, this sequel seemed perfect to my young eyes, and, as the years went by, it soon became something of a platonic ideal for what superhero movies should be but seldom were. And yet, despite all this love, I think I started to take the picture for granted.

Revisiting Spider-Man 2 for the first time since my teen years was a revelation. I also had a blast…

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Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Alexander Skarsgård Special

by Nathaniel R

Alexander Skarsgård in his first movie role in 1984

Alexander Skarsgárd is nothing if not committed to his nearly feral manchild in The Northman. He embraces the movie's mythological brutality and reminds us of both his indisputable screen charisma and the too little acknowledged fact that its unusually flexible in terms of tone and genre and auteurial vision. This may be another northman (you can't change your ancestry) but it's definitely not Eric Northman of True Blood fame! And speaking of the Nordic vampire that made him internationally famous, this is a good time to look back to his breakthrough season from the summer of 2008 to the summer of 2009. Not that he was a "new" actor in 2008, mind you...

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