Streaming Review: Boss Level

by Ben Miller

 

Groundhog Day is becoming its own genre of film.  Groundhog Day as a horror film -> Happy Death Day.  Groundhog Day as a sci-fi war film -> Edge of Tomorrow.  Groundhog Day as an existential romantic comedy -> Palm Springs.  Joe Carnahan's Boss Level continues this new tradition as the violent action film edition. It does this while maintaining a fun tone and never crossing over into offensiveness.

Frank Grillo stars as Roy Pulver, a former special forces soldier who wakes up every morning with people trying to kill him...

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Last few days to stream these titles!

by Nathaniel R

Crazy Rich Asians is about to leave HBO

We've decided to do our streaming roulette feature a bit differently (and weekly) since streaming movies come and go so quickly. It's too overwelming to list everything and who's checking three weeks later anyway? We'll start on March 1st but since there's only four days left in February, here are some titles that you might want to watch now because they're leaving the services this weekend! As we do we've blind-frozen them at totally random places (no cheating) just to see what image/line comes up and sharing it with you...

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Almost There: Marlene Dietrich in "Shanghai Express"

by Cláudio Alves

A cabaret performer and silent film actress during the Weimar years, Marlene Dietrich left Berlin at the dawn of the 1930s. She abandoned Germany, traveling to Hollywood with director Josef von Sternberg who'd go on to make Dietrich into Tinseltown's most glamorous star. The pair of creative partners and off-screen lovers shot seven films together, all of them classics whose sensuous allure and grotesque opulence make for some of the weirdest pictures to come out of Hollywood at the time. Theirs was a cinema of provocation, hedonistic spectacles that overwhelmed the senses even as they moved at a lethargic pace as if the films themselves are bodies recuperating in the aftermath of an orgasm. As an avowed fan of Marlene Dietrich, this septet represents some of my favorite flicks, their dreams of celluloid working as siren songs that never fail to seduce and enchant.

The Criterion Channel is now streaming these seven glistening gems, so it's a good time to explore a Sternberg-directed Dietrich performance that came palpably close to an Oscar nomination. Let's talk Lily in Shanghai Express…

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Weekend box office: Croods is a rare pandemic hit and Nomadland just opened

by Nathaniel R

so sad we'll never get to see this one on the big screen!

We haven't been checking in with the box office regularly because it's so uneventful. But it's good to glance on occassion. Here's the US box office top ten (links go to reviews). There's a few thoughts after the jump as well.

1. The Croods New Age $1.7 (cum. $50.8)
2. The Little Things $1.2 (cum. $11.8)
3. Judas and the Black Messiah $905k (cum. $3.3)
4. Wonder Woman 1984 $805k (cum. $42.6)
5. The Marksman $781k (cum. $11.4)...

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Martin Scorsese on Fellini and the devaluing of movies as "content"

If you want your love for cinema reenergized you'll want to head to Harpers to read Martin Scorsese's wonderful essay on Federico Fellini and his 1960s heyday and artistic influence. Though much of the essay is a love letter to cinema and Fellini himself (and I Vitelloni, La Dolce Vita, and 8½ in particular) Scorsese also sticks his neck out again to comment on today's cinematic landscape. He always runs into trouble when he does this because people are so quick to misinterpret or take notions out of context or dismiss artistic concerns as "get off my lawn!" generational warfare. But art is for everyone of all ages and it's important and we should always rise up in its defense. That's not being 'out of touch,' that's simply caring about something deeply!

Take this bit for example, in which he discusses streaming culture and the way it devalues movies as "content" a business term, no longer an artistic one...

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