Inside, Inside Llewyn Davis
Jan03

Inside, Inside Llewyn Davis

The line of dialogue that starts and ends Inside Llewyn Davis is this: “If it was never new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song.” Llewyn Davis lives a life kind of like that. He’s drunk a lot, and he ignores things people tell him, so he’s consistently surprised by the way people react to his presence. And yet at the same time, it’s nothing new. Llewyn pisses people off so often that there’s a sort of resigned acceptance he’s...

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Big, Bad Wolf
Dec30

Big, Bad Wolf

Sometimes it’s not just what you watch, but how you watch it that matters. There’s a scene in the film Boiler Room when a group of Wall Street stockbrokers is watching Wall Street together, and they have all of Gordon Gekko’s lines memorized. They’re drinking beers and eating popcorn and having a general great time. In other words, Oliver Stone’s warning against the capitalistic excess of Wall Street, in the wrong hands, turned...

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Bring the Payne
Dec23

Bring the Payne

A retired widower driving a Winnebago to see his daughter’s wedding, realizing with every mile how wasted his life has been. A failed novelist who thinks he’s a wine connoisseur when really he’s just an alcoholic. A real estate mogul whose entire family seems to hate the sight of him. A high school teacher whose boredom with his own life manifests itself in the unreasonable hatred of a straight-A student. A pregnant woman whose...

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Same Old Story
Dec10

Same Old Story

Well, as my friend Ben would say: yup, that movie exists. Surprisingly, you can read this whole article without having seen the film and the ending won’t be spoiled (I don’t give it away, I promise). I’d seen the original five years ago, and so this time around there were no surprises to spoil, though if I’m honest I never really thought the surprise was all that great in the first place. This is not to say that the end is easy to...

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I Was Wrong: Apologies to How I Met Your Mother
Dec09

I Was Wrong: Apologies to How I Met Your Mother

This past May, when the season finale of How I Met Your Mother concluded with a shot of—wait for it—the mother’s face, I reacted pretty strongly. I, and I’d imagine at least a few other dedicated HIMYM fans, was disappointed that she turned out to be someone we’d never seen before, thus turning all of the teases and hints of the previous eight years into just that: teases. My argument at the time was that what HIMYM had done was to...

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