This week on The Screen Addict: only one film is brave enough to discuss the negative economic impact of freeing thousands of Hebrew slaves. Plus, a brief discussion of the embarrassing and alarming cancellation of Seth Rogen’s The Interview, a look back at Boogie Nights, MALICK COMIN’, and I’m not monkeying around with this week’s streaming recommendation. (Sorry.) Continue reading
Author: Matt Kraus
Reese Witherspoon’s Trophy Trot
This week on The Screen Addict: Reese Witherspoon takes a walk, Eddie Redmayne becomes Stephen Hawking, two foreign imports that will rank high on my forthcoming list of the best films of the year, and the Steve Jobs movie that may never come to fruition. Oh, and did you hear there’s a new Star Wars movie coming? Continue reading
Ones on 1: The rambling, personal charm of “Funny People”
Ones on 1 is a monthly feature in which I write about a selected film that reached number one at the box office for precisely one weekend. This month, we examine the film that took the crown on August 2, 2009: Funny People.
Five years removed from its theatrical run, it seems particularly insane that a film like Judd Apatow’s Funny People was given a wide release. It’s hard to even recall a recent independent movie that has aimed for the same kind of specific, rambling ambition. There may not be another movie like it, and that is both to its credit and detriment. It isn’t terribly unique on a micro level, but when looking at the big picture—and all the bits, conflicts and ideas it throws into its 146-minute stew—it reveals just how strange and admirable this whole undertaking was. This could only be made by someone who had already reached the top of the mountain, and by the time Funny People came out, Apatow was on an unparalleled roll. This film ended that roll, but it clearly wasn’t for lack of trying. Continue reading
Wrestling for Meaning
This week on The Screen Addict: The frustrating chilliness of Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, going bigger and better with Interstellar, the beginning of The Hunger Games’ end, an exciting piece of James Bond news, and more. Continue reading
Where No Late-Night Host Has Gone Before
This week on The Screen Addict: Jon Stewart puts on a serious face for the big screen, Michael Keaton puts on a show in Birdman, and yes, I’m also listening to that podcast everyone else is. Read on for all that and more. Continue reading
To “Interstellar” and Beyond
So, this is the dilemma. When I rebooted my blog as “The Screen Addict” a few months back, I basically did it as a self-inflicted kick in the butt. I had stopped writing regularly, and I thought starting over might provide the appropriate motivation. Well, it did. For a while. Then various factors converged, including a busy stretch of work and non-work stuff, and there was also the very basic problem that when I got home from work, the last thing I wanted to do was get back on a computer and keep dealing with words. So, once again, I find myself changing what this blog is going to be. The goal is this: once, in the middle of (almost) every week, there will be one of these posts. I might write other stuff in between, and I plan to resume Ones on 1 in December, but this is more or less going to be it.
Summer of Cruise VI: The end of ambition
Throughout most of his career, Tom Cruise has made his film decisions based on one thing: to where will audiences follow him? For a while, the answer to that question was “pretty much anywhere.” However, in the last decade or so, a slight tension seems to have developed between Cruise and audiences. His films have been quite successful for the most part, but this summer’s critically lauded Edge of Tomorrow is a rare Cruise blockbuster that bombed in theaters. You could feel something like this coming for a while. In the last several years, we have seen Cruise star in several action movies that are broadly appealing, but hardly the best use of the star’s talents, and none of the marketing leading up to Edge of Tomorrow’s release indicated that audiences would be getting anything new. We have entered an age of potential Cruise fatigue, and it can all be traced back to the hullabaloo surrounding the release of War of the Worlds in 2005. Continue reading
Ones on 1: In 1991, Martin Scorsese finally scored a hit with “Cape Fear”
Ones on 1 is a monthly feature in which I write about a selected film that reached number one at the box office for precisely one weekend. This month, we examine the film which took the crown on November 17, 1991: Cape Fear.
Since his rise in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Martin Scorsese has always been one of the most respected filmmakers in the world. However, Scorsese the commercially successful filmmaker is a relatively new phenomenon. His four most successful films (The Departed, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street and The Aviator) have all come in the last 10 years. In the ’80s especially, he was seen as a brilliant filmmaker who made box office failure after box office failure, with the lone exception being 1986’s The Color of Money. Other, intensely personal projects like Raging Bull, The King of Comedy and The Last Temptation of Christ all failed when loosed upon the general public. He was always a brilliant director, but as the ’80s turned into the ’90s, most were ready to accept that his work just was never going to really click with the public at large. Continue reading
Viewing Diary (8/8/14)
I know what you’re thinking. “A Viewing Diary at the end of the week? How strange!” Indeed, it is. However, it was either get this out there now or go an entire week without a new blog post, and I decided to choose the former. There will be no Viewing Diary next week, but the next Summer of Cruise will certainly go up at some point. That’s also been moving a little slowly, I’ll admit, but it shall be resumed shortly. As for the movies we shall talk about this week: how about the smash hit Guardians of the Galaxy, with a side of Hercules and I Origins? Plus, for the classic film of the week (the new thing I’m calling the Miscellaneous section) I finally get around to Richard Linklater’s breakthrough film Slacker. Continue reading
Ones on 1: The brief, unprecedented success of “Fahrenheit 9/11”
Welcome to the first edition of Ones on 1, a new monthly feature I will be doing for the blog. The basic premise is simple: on the first of every month, I will write about a random film that was number one at the box office for precisely one weekend. That may sound like a broad topic, and it is, but the goal will be to choose films that achieved that peak, but didn’t quite belong there. Every Sunday, film journalists look at the box office standings, and most of the time the “winning” film is the most obvious choice. Ones on 1 will shine a light on some of the misfits who found themselves in a very exclusive, blockbuster-filled club. On that note, it feels appropriate that the first installment of this feature will examine the single most successful documentary of all time: Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. That’s right: to this day no documentary has been more financially successful, and it made headlines upon its release for being the first film in that genre to top the weekend box office. In the spring of 2004, it won the Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival. This is an insane level of success and attention, but just ten years later it seems almost nobody thinks about it anymore. Most wouldn’t even call it the best Michael Moore movie. This was a documentary that burned impossibly bright, then quickly faded away. Continue reading
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