Film critic Mike D’Angelo was the sole reason I started reading Time Out New York. I’m no film expert but I am incredibly picky in the video store or at the cinema. Hence the concluding parts to the Matrix and LOTR trilogies passed me by after disappointing sequels. I’d rather skip Meet the Parents and take a chance on earth-shatteringly depressing films like Love Liza or Head On. So, I was thrilled to find a critic with the power to sum up films like this:
Not remotely anti-Semitic, but utterly anti-dramatic, Mel Gibson’s unprecedentedly bloody portrait of Jesus of Nazareth’s final day on earth arrives on a wave of pointless controversy that threatens to engulf the larger truth about the movie: that it has virtually nothing to offer anybody who doesn’t already believe that its hero died for their sins
Or this:
Of all the filmmakers currently working, perhaps only Von Trier has both the courage to employ such a baldly theatrical conceit and the skill to transform it into something triumphantly cinematic. Simple, magical, ferocious and visionary, Dogville makes most other recent movies—even the handful of really good ones—seem anemic by comparison. Its formal audacity is matched only by its metaphorical potency. Better still, it’s just a humdinger of a yarn, exacting and relentless; at a few minutes shy of three hours, it feels shorter than movies less than half its length. Narrated with amused detachment by John Hurt, possessor of the most magnificent voice in Hollywood since the death of Orson Welles, the story unfolds with the economy and inevitability of one of Grimm’s fairy tales, though I can’t recall the brothers devoting an entire narrative to the systematic plucking of the fairy’s wings.
So imagine my disappointment at his departure from TONY last year. And my relief when I found him again on his own personal website here, reviewing films for Nerve.com here, and blogging here. It turns out he even lives in the same neighborhood as me.
PS I watched Kurasawa’s Ran last night. It was excellent. But it occurred to me near the end that the storyline (an adaptation of King Lear) could have been summed up in two words. Shit happens!
