Month in Review: August 2013

Robert Zemeckis's I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND

Links to Letterboxd reviews in August:

8/2 The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese)
8/3 I'm So Excited (Pedro Almodóvar)
8/3 All the President's Men (Alan J. Pakula)
8/4 How Green Was My Valley (John Ford)
8/9 Mysterious Object at Noon (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
8/10 The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula)
8/10 Red Road (Andrea Arnold)
8/16 Blue Jasmine (Woody Allen)
8/17 Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski)
8/19 I Wanna Hold Your Hand (Robert Zemeckis)
8/23 Elysium (Neill Blomkamp)
8/24 Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone)
8/24 The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler)
8/24 The Inbetweeners Movie (Ben Palmer)
8/28 Ishtar (Elaine May)
8/31 The World's End (Edgar Wright)
8/31 Not Fade Away (David Chase)
8/31 21 Jump Street (Phil Lord & Chris Miller)

Some cinema-related readings:

Earlier in the month, something called Anil Dash caused a stir by calling movie theater shushers "oppressive assholes" who, among other things, are akin to those who defend slavery and oppose same-sex marriage. To him, we (yes I'm a proud shusher) are bullies, which is ironic (he also calls out sticklers for the actual definition of the word) given the fact that it's these people who insist on ruining our experience at the theater that are the actual bullies. Dash's boneheaded logic and equivalencies are completely eviscerated by the always great Matt Zoller Seitz in his responding Vulture article. And the discussion reached its necessarily extreme climax in Scott Beggs's hilarious post over at Film School Rejects called "But Why Can't I Urinate In My Seat At The Movies".

A lovely piece from Martin Scorsese in the New York Review of Books that discusses many things, including the origins of cinema, the need to embrace visual literacy, and the urgency of film preservation. As always, Scorsese not only ranks as cinema's greatest creators but its greatest cheerleaders.

Greg Ferrara on his blog about whether or not it is appropriate to tell certain kinds of stories.

And a discussion in the New York Times on a new breed of pulp cinema.