Films and Feelings

    I'll acknowledge I didn't get to dive as deeply as I'd hoped this month with my chosen theme. Part of that was poor planning, part of that is I'm discovering in realtime the limits of devoting one month to one performer's body of work, particularly when that performer is still alive. The performer in question is, of course, the effervescent Amy Adams.      Like most of my generation, I came to know Adams through her performance as Giselle in Enchanted . Her fantastic work in this role helped cement her as the doe-eyed naivete too pure for this world. Much of her work prior to her breakout role ( Catch Me if You Can , Junebug , etc.) circled a similar note, as did many of her roles in the years immediately following ( Doubt , Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day , etc.).      In the last decade or so, though, Adams has enjoyed more mature and grounded roles, as seen with movies like Nocturnal Animals or Arrival . Part of my conquest this month was t...

           I think most of us wish we were so good at what we did that we could simply walk away for nearly a decade and come back better than before. So it is with Baz Lurhmann who, despite not directing a feature film since 2013, returns to the game with one of his best works yet.     Elvis  traces out the life of The King of Rock and Roll as seen through the eyes of his sleazy manager, Colonel Tom Parker. What follows is a familiar story of fame and fortune told in giant neon letters.  Even if Lurhmann is more subdued here than he is in his magnum opus,  Moulin Rouge! , he still finds room to tell the story in capital letters, and the movie is better for it.      The film paints a picture of a star who not only wrote great music, but whose music was so infectious and whose stage presence so overwhelming that experiencing it live sends one into an uncontrolled frenzy.  Indeed, the moments when Elvis casts his s...

     Film director and victorious fanboy Colin Trevorrow has justified Jurassic World: Dominion and his trilogy by saying it's not just a continuation but a culmination of all the "Jurassic" movies that came before. I suppose it's for each viewer to decide whether Trevorrow and the team he's assembled have pulled that off. We each come to the franchise bringing something personal to the conversation.  As for me though, come the series' twilight moments, I was moved by the way that it made somberness and hope sit next to each other so gracefully. If watching the brachiosaurus tromping across Jurassic Park makes me feel like a kid again, beholding the dinosaurs travailing across the savannah with such dignity took me to a more mature place.     Now that dinosaurs have proliferated across the globe, Owen Grady and Claire Dearing have secluded themselves in their woodland cabin, where they keep their adopted daughter, Maisie, safe from a world that would jump...

    Film is a space where we each sort of leave behind our individual identities are essentially blurred under the glow of a single focal point: the protagonist of tonight's adventure.       There all sorts of means by which this person may be qualified for main characterhood, and there are all forms they may take. But they are all united in their ability to absorb us into them, to convince us for a moment that they are merely the receptacles for our own complex interior lives--that it is our wishes, our desires that are being displayed on the big screen. Of course, w e may actually have nothing in common with the person at the center of this conflict, but such intricacies can be easily smoothed over by the sheer enrapture of the storytelling devices, and the ever pleasant fantasy of being the center of the universe.     And that's kind of an addicting feeling, isn't it? Inception (2010)    A main character, or a protagonist, is  ...