Some weeks are better than others. I’ve had better weeks, but here are the results. Even disappointing movies are fun to write about.
Film
Sunday Film Roundup (4/30/2017)
Escobar: Paradise Lost (2014)
Director: Andrea DiStefano
A mildly absorbing crime melodrama about an innocent Canadian guy named Nick who marries Pablo Escobar’s niece and gets sucked into the family business. A theme like this has great potential if handled the right way, but it turns out that the director prefers formula to serious drama. Irritatingly fresh-faced young Canadian (Josh Hutcherson) is hanging around on the beaches of Colombia in the early 1990s with his brother, doing not much of anything but surfing and looking like a dipshit gringo target for extortion.
Sunday Movie Roundup (4/23/2017)
Oklahoma City (2017)
Director: Barak Goodman
The 1990s seem to have an air of unreality about them now. Looking back, they seem like a time of missed opportunities: failure to reform the financial system, failure to improve the infrastructure, failure to understand the consequences of unrelenting interference in Middle Eastern affairs. The drama of 9/11–and everything that followed from it–superseded all that came before it. It blocked out from our collective memory the threat of domestic radicalism and replaced it the the overarching National Security State where everything was watched and everything was monitored.
Sunday Movie Roundup (4/16/2017)
Disorder (2015)
Director: Alice Winocour
This is one of those great, slow-burning movies that slipped under the radar (at least here in the United States). It’s part character study and part suspense drama, but the end result is a very satisfying cinematic experience. Lead actor Matthias Schoenaerts is a great actor whom I’ve admired for a long time; he deserves to be a big star and I hope he continues on the trajectory he’s on. To get an idea of just how good he can be, you should check out the great horror film Left Bank (2008) and the drama Bullhead (2011).
Sunday Movie Roundup (3/19/2017)
The Wall (Die Wand) (2012)
Director: Julian Pölsler
This is an intriguing, mysterious, and unnerving meditation on loneliness and alienation. An art-house film that may not be to everyone’s liking, this top-notch drama features fantastic choreography and views of the Austrian Alps, as well as a great performance by Martina Gedeck. The plot: a woman visiting some friends in the Alps suddenly discovers that she is cut off from the rest of the world. And when I say “cut off,” I mean literally cut off. There is some kind of deflection barrier or “force field” that encases the area around her cottage from which there is no escape.
There’s Nothing Shameful In Having Problems (Podcast)
I recently saw the 2004 documentary Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster. The film shows the group trying to keep itself together in the wake of band tension, personal issues, and creative deadlock. How these problems are confronted and solved make this a film very much worth watching. We discuss some of the lessons learned.
There is nothing wrong or shameful in having problems. The measure of a man is how he confronts and handles those problems.
Wednesday Movie Roundup (2/28/2017)
These are the latest two films I’ve check out in recent days. Both of them are very good, if somewhat maddening in not resolving some plot twists I would have liked to see resolved.
Quintus Curtius 
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