Matt Damon as Jason Bourne Photo: Slashfilm
All this attention on Bond has only served to show how successfully the Jason Bourne films had created a spy franchise for the modern world, says Stephen Phelan at Full Stop. In this intelligent and thought-provoking essay, he also digresses into the a Bond discussion as well as some observations on the careers of the principals (including director Paul Greengrass):
The casting of Tom Hanks in the title role [in Captain Phillips] was surely a clue, marking out the middle ground of the perpetual American everyman caught between historic forces. That celebrated final scene, as Hanks credibly acted out the physiological symptoms of post-traumatic shock, was perhaps the clearest expression of an awareness that rings through Greengrass’s Hollywood career like a fire alarm: what movies present as action, the real world experiences as violence.
(H/T to Guy Somerset’s weekly summary of arts coverage for NZ Festival, ARTicle.)
Probably not deserving of the epithet “best” but certainly one of the more provocative pieces of the week, Jesse Eisenberg’s satirical portrait of a bitter New York online movie reviewer:
Nonetheless, “Paintings of Cole” is easily the best movie of the year. I’m saying this only in the hope that the studio might print my name after a blurb on the movie poster. And I’ve always wanted to have my name on a movie poster. How cool would that be?
Eisenberg’s slightly limp attempt at humour – which reads very easily if you imagine his distinctive voice – has managed to prompt quite a few think pieces on the nature of movie criticism in the digital age, most of which are summarised by Matt Zoller Seitz at RogerEbert.com.
Hour 40 of Eisenberg-gate. Weary and immune to flogging, our horses collapse. We exchange them for new ones at the inn and press on.
— Vadim Rizov (@vrizov) November 19, 2015
[*May not be the actual best. We haven't read the entire internet. Also, it’s been a quiet week with lots of noisy outrage but short on quality.]
