Archive for the 'Eitan's Takes' Category
Annie Hall (1977): Eitan’s Take
Well, I’ve been wondering for two years where I would even begin with Annie Hall, and now that the day has finally come and gone, I still feel reluctant to let it all out here. Unlike The Godfather, which is a difficult film to tackle because it feels like everything’s already been said, Annie Hall [...]
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Tags: Annie Hall, Christopher Walken, Diane Keaton, Eitan 10, Woody Allen
Rocky (1976): Eitan’s Take
I have been so unfair to this film over the years. I had long been dreading it, mostly because I remembered it as a sloppy, saccharine, cliche piece of crap. But watching it this afternoon, I feel like I finally understand why Rocky has been part of our national conversation about film for so long. [...]
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Tags: Burgess Meredith, Burt Young, Carl Weathers, Eitan 8, Rocky, Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire
I’ve only seen three Milos Forman movies, but it’s hard to watch a single frame of this director’s work without understanding where his talent lies: he has a singular ability to understand madness. From One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Amadeus to Man on the Moon, Forman shows that he understands the complex dimensions [...]
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Tags: Brad Dourif, Eitan 10, Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
“Seeing you reminds me of New York… the old days.”
I’ve been waiting for almost two years to have this chance to rewatch The Godfather Part II and fully articulate my numerous problems with it. I had seen it at the beginning of my college career and felt truly disappointed, but before watching it tonight, my [...]
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Tags: Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Eitan 6, John Cazale, Robert DeNiro, Robert Duvall, The Godfather Part II
The Sting (1973): Eitan’s Take
One of the best things about watching these films chronologically is that we really get to see trends emerging. During a long stretch of the 30’s, I remarked about how Best Picture winners tend to be films about ambitious, powerful, larger-than-life men. During other periods, we’ve been treated to the rise of the epic, the [...]
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Tags: Charles Durning, Eileen Brennan, Eitan 9, Harold Gould, Paul Newman, Ray Walston, Robert Redford, Robert Shaw, The Sting
Whenever characters in a movie or TV show go out to the movies — and this happens in Seinfeld quite a bit — they always end up seeing some vaguely anonymous, obviously fake popcorn flick. I watch these scenes and wonder: do they have all the same movies we have in real life? Or in [...]
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Tags: Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Eitan 10, James Caan, John Cazale, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, The Godfather
It could be argued that The French Connection is the purest genre film to ever win Best Picture. From the first frame to the last, this is a film that never pretends to be anything but a smart, propulsive thriller about the dark alleys and gangland hideouts of New York City. Its characters barely have [...]
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Tags: Eitan 8, Fernando Rey, Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider, The French Connection
Patton (1970): Eitan’s Take
I’m a huge fan of the Call of Duty series of video games; I think anyone who grew up with fighter jet posters on their walls and a lump in their throat every time they visited the Air and Space Museum finds themselves magnetically drawn to those first-person WWII epics. The one problem with Call [...]
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Tags: Eitan 9, George C. Scott, Karl Malden, Patton
We’re getting to the point where it’s going to be very difficult to separate my own preexisting opinions and emotions about these films from the critical/cultural viewpoint I’m supposed to be lending in this project. Midnight Cowboy has been one of my favorite films since I was a teenager. In this small, strange package, I [...]
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Tags: Dustin Hoffman, Eitan 10, Midnight Cowboy
Oliver! (1968): Eitan’s Take
I sometimes forget how dark and visionary the work of Charles Dickens can be. I read most of his great books (Great Expectations, Bleak House, David Copperfield) and loved them, but time has dulled them in my memory. Seeing Oliver tonight brought back a lot of recollections about the grim choreography of his greatest narratives. [...]
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Tags: Eitan 9, jack wild, Mark Lester, Oliver Reed, Oliver!, Ron Moody, Shani Wallis
Released in the thick of the Summer of Love, Norman Jewison’s truly incendiary In the Heat of the Night is the first Best Picture winner we’ve seen that has felt really immediate, really visceral, and really contemporary. Its brilliant social critiques are obvious (or, at least they are now) and its central mystery is hardly [...]
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Tags: Eitan 8, In the Heat of the Night, Rod Steiger, Sidney Poitier
Was Sir Thomas More a brilliant political dissident, or merely a valiant fool who waged a pointless fight against the King of England? Fred Zinnemann’s fascinating, powerful film manages to address this question in a philosophical and complex way that More himself might have admired. The audience is never patronized or diminished by the proceedings; [...]
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Tags: Uncategorized
One of my major problems with all the hubbub surrounding bland underdog films like Slumdog Millionaire is that critics (and, eventually, audiences) project onto the film an affect of feel-good triumph that isn’t really there. I wasn’t standing in the aisle cheering at the end of Little Miss Sunshine; I was looking down at the [...]
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Tags: Christopher Plummer, Eitan 10, Julie Andrews, The Sound of Music
I had forgotten how damned annoying Audrey Hepburn is for the first 45 minutes of My Fair Lady. Stomping, shrieking, growling, and yelping, she almost threatens to derail the entirely gorgeous affair. The fact that this film is, in spite of that early performance, so utterly charming, fulfilling, and likable is a testament to the [...]
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Tags: Audrey Hepburn, Eitan 9, My Fair Lady, Rex Harrison
Tom Jones (1963): Eitan’s Take
Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of watching Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon for the first time. I was taken aback by its joyful grimness, its lyricism, its visual grandeur, and its nihilistic cleverness. In reviews of Kubrick’s film, I read that many critics feared that it would be a film close in style and [...]
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Tags: Albert Finney, Edith Evans, Eitan 5, Hugh Griffith, Susannah York, Tom Jones
It is hard in such a short space to sing the praises of Lawrence of Arabia, a film so complex and so daring that it actually earns every one of its nearly four hours of running time. Artistically, it is possibly the greatest triumph in the history of filmmaking — it proves how harrowing and [...]
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Tags: Alec Guinness, David Lean, Eitan 10, Lawrence of Arabia, Omar Sharif, Peter O'Toole
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