Is this supposed to be ironic, or something?

He’s very good at directing Shakespeare. He’s really a theater guy and maybe he felt that with a weaker source material than Shakespeare he should put stuff in to “class it up.” Which is not to say his Shakespeare movies are stuffy. he does a lot to make them accessible and use the movie format to his advantage.…

HE FUCKING DIRECTED A FOUR GODDAMN HOUR HAMLET ADAPTATION.

She also made 13th recently which was excellent. I think people spend too much time blaming directors and not enough time blaming these pieced together, 5 credited writer, awful scripts. Modern blockbuster writing is pretty lackluster for the most part, and especially within the confines of a bug machine, a director…

I think the problem is that people want it to be one or the other, when the truth is somewhere in the middle. Marvel movies improve when they let the directors have their own spin but are still identifiably Marvel products. It’s where that line gets drawn between “Marvelness” and the director’s voice that people argue…

Directors who are successful at scaling up are usually very good at delegating. They tend to have a regular crew they can trust. So now instead of the DP also being the camera op, there’s a larger crew that the DP is in charge of for all cinematography-related matters. Or the one wardrobe person now has an entire…

M. Night fell off for a long time. The big 3 franchises (Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street) had been dead for nearly a decade (and were bad when they did reappear). Franchises like The Conjuring, Paranormal Activity, and Saw aren’t really associated with a single director or vision. Lastly,…

It’s really interesting because the average audience member of The Eternals wouldn’t know or care about Chloe Zhao because they haven’t watched, nor intend to watch, Nomadland (or any of her other films).

Sure, she won an Oscar, but for the MCU, that Oscar isn’t causing a flurry of additional ticket sales because…

I don’t think the problem is that Zhao and DuVernay are directors capable of only one good film. Directors have individual sensibilities and talents that often lend themselves to particular genres. Christopher Nolan is not likely to make a great slapstick comedy. Experience is also a factor — just like athletes and…

I completely forgot about that whole controversy. Maybe it won’t be released in China, but make no mistake that The Eternals was made with an eye squarely on the Chinese market (Shang-Chi as well). Of course, I’m not saying they shouldn’t make these films, just that I have a cynical outlook as to their reasons, becau…

Jordan Peele being anointed the king-of-all-horror based on a single movie is another great example.  

I would love to see your Teletubbies slow motion, firey car crash movie idea realized.

I rewatched the first Thor movie recently for the first time in quite a while, and the Dutch angles really at just so pointless. I could see using a few of them, but at some point there’s so many you don’t know what they’re supposed to communicate.

It’s really much more mercenary than that. You get a name director of Chinese descent and sprinkle a few actors of Chinese or South Asian descent in the cast, and you find yourself doing much better in the already hyuuuge Chinese market. As talented a filmmaker as Zhao is, I doubt they give one solitary fuck about…

I don’t know if she is or not.  My impression, from distilling all of the reviews, is that there is a real pacing issue with The Eternals and that she attempted to make a genre of storytelling a slow burn that doesn’t lend itself well to the slow burn.  That doesn’t mean she’s a one hit wonder at all, but it does mean…

I didn’t say that festival movies that hardly anyone sees don’t count as movies. As I said in my first post, ‘1 film of note.’ Her festival films simply weren’t very noteworthy. They, at the very least, demonstrated to the people who had the power to hire her for projects that people will see that she had a basic…

Spielberg absolutely uses his signature style in Schindler’s List. He only doesn’t if you literally consider his signature style “kids looking with awe lit with beams of light in the darkness.” 

I saw it in the theaters. “Pretty bad” would be a big step up. 

The devolution will be televised.