In the inchoate days of COVID, like everybody else, I reached out to old friends with whom I hadn’t spoken in months, maybe a year. One of whom, a cineaste and crime writer in California, echoed one of my early observations: “There’s going to so many pandemic movies now.” This stands to reason. Whatever the crisis, whether it’s Vietnam, 9-11, the Iraq War, the 2008 recession … [Read more...]
‘Game Night’ has a monopoly on other people’s ideas
While enjoying, to a point, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s Game Night, I spent much of the picture wishing it had gone in a completely different, and subtler, direction. It’s easy to imagine some other project titled Game Night gestating and then languishing in the primordial muck of preproduction: a lo-fi, low-budget, semi-improvised mumblecore ensemble about a … [Read more...]