Recent writing

I’ve been remiss, but I’ve written about some great things for TribecaFilm, which you can watch on the internet:

Wonder Boys



Burden of Dreams



You know what these two films have in common? Wonder Boys has the first great performance by Robert Downey Jr. post-his drug problem. The Werner Herzog madness in Burden of Dreams (along with the Apocalypse Now doc) inspired a pretty hilarious fake documentary for Tropic Thunder, Rain of Madness. Rewatching it reminded me of how insane RDJ’s comic performance is in that film. I don’t think the Academy had the stones to give him the Oscar - it would’ve been interesting to see a real fight between Heath Ledger, RDJ, and Michael Shannon, instead of the “died tragically/was robbed for Brokeback Mountain” make-up Oscar - but what a wild, mad performance. Who else could’ve pulled it off?

Herzog in Burden of Dreams manages to be both absolutely crazy and completely inspiring. His interviews are quite beautiful.

For those who like David Foster Wallace, John Krasinski’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is also currently on Hulu, for the rest of this week. It is an honorable failure of a film - ultimately not very good and quite stagey and most actors make these monologues sound as foreign as bad Shakespeare - but I’m always interested in Great Literature translating to film, people don’t attempt it and if they do, they often fail, and this is a textbook case. Kudos to JK, however, for attempting it.

I also wrote about an interesting short doc series, Sparrow Songs, who are currently in the last couple of days in a Kickstarter campaign (and probably won’t make it - Kickstarter folks, when things like that happen, do you ever do analysis? I’m curious with this one…were they aiming too high?) The takeaway? Give yourself a month deadline every month and pursue some art. Do it for me!