MZS

The Estate of George Carlin Destroys AI George Carlin in Victory for Copyright Protection (and Basic Decency) | MZS

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Recent legal decisions in copyright suits against AI software-makers have already begun to chip away at tech’s insistence (which is laughable on its face) that there is no substantive difference between an aspiring art student studying a book of Rembrandt paintings in order to paint in the style of Rembrandt and a soulless digital machine imbibing and digesting millions of works … Read more

A Man Goes to the Movies: An Appreciation of Roger Ebert’s Top 10 Lists | MZS

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Roger’s very first Top 10 list for The Chicago Sun-Times, his home outlet for decades, listed a lot of movies that were probably common sights on other people’s lists, including “The Graduate,” “Blowup,” “Ulysses,” “A Man for All Seasons,” and the eventual Oscar winner “In the Heat of the Night.” It also included “Bonnie and … Read more

On Luca, Tenet, The Invisible Man and Other Films from the Early Pandemic Era that Deserve More Big-Screen Time | MZS

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And what about the horror thriller “The Invisible Man,” one of the most mercilessly tense films I’ve seen in the past decade? It got released right before lockdown and made $144 million globally, a staggering haul for a medium-budgeted genre picture whose biggest star was Elisabeth Moss. Who knows what it would’ve made if it had … Read more

The Unloved, Part 124: Play Dirty | MZS

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André de Toth fled Hungary before the second world war and relocated to the US where he made westerns and films noir attacking American complacency in its everyday iterations, a more sly, less expressionistic Fritz Lang, who allowed his audience to put together puzzle pieces and see the picture of corruption ourselves (to quote Martin Scorsese, his most … Read more

The Joy of Watching the Greats Continue to Be Great Well Into Their 80s and 90s | MZS

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I didn’t care for the recent reboot of “The Exorcist” and didn’t like what they did with the legacy character of Chris McNeil, poor little Regan McNeil’s mother from the original 1973 film, but I loved seeing Burstyn, now 91, seizing the movie by the throat for the brief time she was onscreen. Ian McShane, beloved from … Read more

Titus: The Masterpiece that the Cinematic Greatness of 1999 Obscured | MZS

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Based on Shakespeare’s last and bloodiest tragedy—and a play that some consider to be more trouble to adapt and more off-putting to audience than it’s worth to mount—”Titus” was a great example of a filmmaker expending the artistic capital they’d accrued on a very successful commercial project to make something that was expensive but challenging. … Read more

Eye on the Screen: David Bordwell (1947-2024) | MZS

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“Preconceived methods, applied simply for demonstrative purposes, often end by reducing the complexity of films,” David and Kristin once wrote. That’s a sentiment I heartily agree with. It bears repeating today, now that so much of “cultural writing” consists of “takes” that discuss works of moving image art as if they were pamphlets or PDFs, and that … Read more

The Unloved, Part 123: Birth | MZS

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Jonathan Glazer has always skirted the mainstream without becoming part of it. Maybe it’s his interest in the destruction of the self that will always keep him at arm’s length; maybe it’s a formal alienation that insists you stare headlong into the abyss while he watches you do so. It’s an impish strategy and it has yielded … Read more

30 Minutes On: Dune Part Two | MZS

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Like the other adaptations of “Dune,” this new one can’t do much with the exotic mix-and-match appropriation of Middle Eastern traditions, language and religious concepts except keep them, since the story wouldn’t be “Dune” without them. But it does seem to consciously lean into it a bit more in the second chapter, perhaps by way of provocation and complication, while … Read more

30 Minutes On: Dune Part One | MZS

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“Dune” is the culmination-to-date of Villeneuve’s “simple/gigantic” phase. The story of House Atreides is a tragedy that becomes an underdog revenge-and-reinvention story, while at the same time plugging into mid-century Western pop culture’s fascination with hallucinogenic drugs, altered states of consciousness, a substratum of Orientalism, and what’s now called a “white savior” narrative, in the … Read more