Hello and welcome to my annual attempt at contributing to Criterion Month! This year, not only did I have the advantage of an extra month to prepare but also I drafted way more recent movies than Colin and John on average, so I had a light load to begin the month too. And yet… I still didn’t finish watching my first movie until just about midnight on the day I was supposed to post about it. What can I say at this point? You can’t teach an old dog new tricks?
In Criterion Months past, I reviewed two films in the box set, Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman. The first film I reviewed was Zeman’s 1962 adaptation of the folk tale The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, while a couple years later I reviewed Zeman’s recreation of prehistoric times in Journey To The Beginning of Time. With this entry, Invention For Destruction, I complete the trilogy of films in this box set as well as all of Zeman’s films in the Criterion Collection, and in the process have found what may be my favorite of the three. If nothing else, it’s the one that I find the most visually striking, as it sticks to a very specific visual milieu. And though it’s occasionally lacking in the storytelling department, it quite simply has some of the most stunning special effects in movies I’ve ever seen. Continue reading
My first entry this Criterion Month is very steeped in the sci-fi of a very particular era – the 1950s, which was influenced by American paranoia over nuclear destruction and saw the rise of aliens from another world, giant insects, and creatures from black lagoons. 1957’s The Incredible Shrinking Man, focuses on something not quite as spectacular: a man who, as you might guess, can’t stop shrinking. It’s a fairly straightforward premise, but in the hands of B-movie maverick Jack Arnold and writer Richard Matheson, it becomes something as unsettling (and entertaining) as anything the era produced. Continue reading
Welcome to Mildly Pleased’s 8th Annual Criterion Month! Yet again, Sean, Colin, and I will be reviewing stuffy, artsy, and probably long movies from the Criterion Collection for a whole month. So put down those sunglasses, drop that surfboard, and dim the lights—for cinematic purposes (not romantic). Pop some corn and join us for a journey into the world of le cinéma (the cinema).
It’s that time of year again! Well, sort of. This year we’re pushing our annual Criterion Month back a month due to summer travel plans, which will perhaps give us time to buy some of the blu rays on sale at Barnes & Noble’s July Criterion Sale? Who knows, but one thing we do know is that we’ve stuck to the same format of picking our movies to review each year. We each take turns selecting our films over the course of a podcast and then struggle to describe what these movies are about. But that’s ok! We haven’t seen them yet, but luckily a sense of discovery will prevail during the ensuing month as we find out why these films are deserving of being in the Collection. Continue reading
Now let’s take a look at some of the more recent albums that transitioned us from Winter to Spring to Summer. As you may notice, a lot of these albums are a bit more high profile or ones I had already been anticipating, but well, those are just the albums you end up listening to the week (or month) of their release. Hopefully, there will be a few more low-key albums out there from this first half of the year that I’m able to catch up with as the year progress. And who knows, maybe I’ll end up writing about them at year’s end.
For the first three albums, I don’t need to go too in-depth with them, since I already praised them on episodes of The Pick. But they’re albums so nice, they’re worth talking about twice. Continue reading
For the first part of this year, writing about music got away from me.
I’m not exactly sure why, but the easiest answer is probably just the general decline in us writing consistent reviews of anything on this blog. Additionally, my general mood about online music writing also hasn’t been helped by the announcement that Pitchfork, the one critical voice that was always dependable, was being folded into GQ, not to mention the other online pop culture sites that have been gutted the past few years.
But really, the more optimistic reason for why I haven’t been posting music reviews on here is that there’s been a fairly overwhelming amount of good music to listen to this year. So much so that every time I’ve found a new favorite album of the moment, a new one gets released the next week. And even when there hasn’t always been a new album out there to mesmerize me, there have also been plenty of high-profile pop albums this year that despite their varying quality, at the very least felt like necessary listening. Perhaps this doesn’t all excuse my laziness, but either way, there have been a lot of albums worth diving into, and it’s made it hard to know where to start. Well, let’s start here. Continue reading
