Museum Hours makes the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder a focal point, and if you have a familiarity with Jem Cohen’s films it makes all the sense in the world that he would be an irer. Bruegel’s landscapes and peasant scenes pull out the beauty hiding in the mundanity, the humanity in the presence of inhumanity, and Cohen seeks the same things.
In 2004's Chain it’s suburban sprawl, for better and worse finding refuge in motels, fast food and…
i fell in love with how quiet, breezy, dreamlike this is while still being so full of things to say. Ed Harris' character Jimmy is an unassuming newspaper man, a good guy who makes a poor choice and ends up strung along by a major local figure. once the wheels of politics start to roll downhill he puts everything on the line to jam a stick in the spokes; protect the people he cares about, preserve what precious little natural…
there's a clean, clippable take of Kevin Costner's Jim Garrison saying "god, i'm ashamed to be an american today", and i'm surprised that hasn't been plucked for handy meme use; a natural companion to Matt Christman's "this is the stupidest day in american history, a record that will be broken by every subsequent day in american history."
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
I always enjoy when a mustache is used as a plot device to signal time ing. timestache.
No filmmaker makes me think so much about real shit like Ingmar Bergman. Like really real. I zoned out for a few minutes watching this thinking about my shortcomings, my place in the world, and then I had a true, honest to goodness existential moment that tingled my spine. It made me insanely uncomfortable, and then seconds later so serenely comfortable that all I could do was smile. A piece of art did that to me. This is what genius looks like.
