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Aidan O'Malley | Tuesday, November 3, 2020
I love Sofia Coppola. I love all of her movies, even the ones that people hate. I love the texture of her films — their intimacy, their insight. I love her impressionist color palette and her eclectic needle drops. I love how she blurs comedy and drama into a kind of lived-in melancholy. She doesn’t
Aidan O'Malley | Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Back in 2014, director David Fincher — in a rare public appearance — spoke at San Diego Comic-Con at a panel celebrating the 15th anniversary of his cult film turned classic, “Fight Club.” While there, the two-time Oscar nominee shared a story. ”My daughter had a friend named Max,” he said. “She told me
Aidan O'Malley | Thursday, October 15, 2020
The leaves are turning, the temperature is dropping and with every passing day, we lose a few more seconds of sunlight. You know what that means: it’s October! And if it’s October, then you know what that means: it’s Halloween! Objectively the second-best holiday (behind only Christmas and just ahead of St. Patrick’s Day), Halloween
Aidan O'Malley | Wednesday, October 14, 2020
Not to be confused with Steve Carell — that’s a different 40-year-old — Radha Blank is an aspiring playwright in New York. Keyword: aspiring. Despite having won a “30 Under 30” award, the last decade of her life has been a rollercoaster ride with a lot more drops than climbs. These days, she’s teaching theatre
Aidan O'Malley | Wednesday, October 7, 2020
Dick Johnson is dead. Well, sort of. Not really. The 86-year-old psychologist is still kicking but with a little less verve than usual. He’s scheduling different clients at the same time, asking the same questions only minutes apart and just the other day, he drove through a construction site on four flat tires. Like his
Aidan O'Malley | Monday, September 28, 2020
In the promotional blitz leading to the release of “The Ascension,” the eighth studio album from the prince of sad boi hours, Sufjan Stevens, much has been said about the singer-songwriter’s shame toward the current state of our country. Of course, such discourse isn’t without warrant; on the final song of the album, “America,” Stevens
Aidan O'Malley | Tuesday, September 22, 2020
“The Devil All the Time” is bad. But boy, is it the best kind of bad! Worse than a bad movie, in my opinion, is a forgettable one. You know the kind I’m talking about — those movies that exit your brain the second the credits have rolled, the kind you see on cable a
Aidan O'Malley | Friday, September 11, 2020
Disney live action remakes are a special kind of cinematic purgatory. Few of them are truly irredeemable; you can always count on lavish production design, ornate costumes and some solid VFX. But in service of what? “Cinderella,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin” — these movies are soulless. I’m not sure a studio has ever been
Aidan O'Malley | Tuesday, September 8, 2020
How do you solve a problem like Charlie Kaufman? Perhaps “problem” is the wrong word. Puzzle? Riddle? Rabbit hole? The Oscar-winning screenwriter of “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” — more recently the director of “Synecdoche, New York” and “Anomalisa” — is one of my favorite filmmakers, but he doesn’t make
Aidan O'Malley | Monday, August 31, 2020
I’ll be honest, I only watched this movie because we’ve been trapped in our dorms for two weeks. That being said, I could have done a lot worse with 90 minutes than “The One and Only Ivan,” the newest addition to the Disney+ catalog and the latest film to forego a theatrical release. I feel