Songs from the Specious Floor: Larrain Imagines the Last Days of a Diva
A penny for the thoughts of Maria Callas regarding Pablo Larraín’s glossy recuperation of her last week of life in Maria, the third in a series of high profile biopics of iconic women following 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer. Scripted by Steven Knight and lensed by Ed Lachman, the end result is a beautiful photo shoot for Angelina Jolie as a superficial approximation of the notoriously difficult diva, long considered by many to be the best opera singer whoever lived. Set during the last week of her life, it’s an elegiac reflection of a life told in various flashbacks as Callas slips into a sort of madness whilst suffering from impending heart and liver failure (which, of course, is not quite rightly reflected in the glamorous comportment of Jolie).… Read the rest
After exploring themes of rebirth and reincarnation in her 2019 Bosnian war feature debut, Heroes Don’t Die (read 
There’s no way to reproduce the imaginative awe of Tim Burton’s 1988 idiosyncratic goth YA classic Beetlejuice. Or, for that matter, any of Burton’s exceptionally weird but trailblazing offerings through the 1980s and 1990s, including his first two Batman films, Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Ed Wood (1994). He lionized Michael Keaton and gave us Winona Ryder as the Gen-X pin-up girl who made brooding cynicism a living, breathing sensibility, the likes of which would only be equaled in animated form by Daria. But he’s an iconoclast whose favored themes and tactics suffered mightily when CGI poisoned his tangible alchemies, and his counter culture worldview eventually became rote.… 
