Tiberio TriPPn

This is the closest you’ll get to a comic book movie on my list. Does it count that it’s a meta-commentary on the fallout of blockbuster franchises? I love showbiz nightmares – Mulholland Drive, Sunset Boulevard, Barton Fink. The viewer gets to look behind the mirror they’re so accustomed to facing. They get to see the dark side of Hollywood glamour, it’s vainglorious path to hell. They get to understand some impression of what a show is a result of. The door opens to the dream factory, where we experience both wonder and fear. What exactly motivates that profound play, that tour de force film, that binge-worthy TV show into existence? That’s the overarching question for Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton), star of the comic book blockbuster Birdman [or Batman ] franchise. In an effort to reignite his career with more prestige, he has turned to Broadway, writing/directing/starring in his own play, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love , adapted from Raymond Carver’s book. His ...

I don’t think Martin Scorsese was ever satisfied that he had a working formula. He’s an artist in the truest sense, continually outdoing himself film after film, seeking the higher question: how can I do this better? After wowing us with 2011’s 3D epic Hugo , Scorsese went back to the drawing board, venturing down the road fellow NYU alumnus Oliver Stone twice rode with his Wall Street series. Wolf of Wall Street showed this world from a different angle, focusing on the interior of it’s Gordon Gekko counterpart, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), an ambitious con artist who starts a brokerage firm that grows into a success, illegally.  Jordan starts out as ‘pond scum,’ working as a stockbroker for L.F. Rothschild on Wall Street, when the infamous Black Monday hits, the largest one day stock market drop in history, leaving him and countless others jobless. He gets employed at an unregulated penny-stock boiler room, using his savvy New York salesmanship in a suburban shoppin...

Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro) is a hitman entirely driven by his fear of something harsher than death: finality . If there’s any truth to religion, death is less an end, more a transition, but finality is an unalterable blackness to which no consciousness will wake from. Of course, death is it’s closest relation, and Frank is exposed to a world where death is at the forefront of his reality – it’s real to him in a way it’s not to you and I, and he can only carry the attitude as long as it’s not me to survive. He probably developed this in World War II, where death was first nature. His killing of two unarmed Nazis, digging their own grave, will be the most buildup we get for any of his kills. In Frank’s eyes, this is a story about survival. But for us, it’s a story about stories. These are the kinds of stories we tell when we’re scrambling to make meaning of life with the looming shadow of death approaching. Many have widely misinterpreted that this is a film about the events lea...

About two weeks ago, I was walking around Walt Disney World, staring at people on lines and wondering about evolution ; how we got to this point, venturing through such severe constructs of imagination, the various bloodlines associated with face types, commonality and a shared human experience of seeking meaning through the grandiosity of myth. I wanted to write a piece about evolution when I got home, and I was fortunate to run into the YouTube page Must See Films, who theorize that the #5 film on my list, The Master , is about evolution. They break it down in three parts: Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) the id, apeman; Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) the ego, superhuman; and Peggy Dodd (Amy Adams), the superego, the master. Freddie is a drifter at sea, returning from World War II in the Navy without any direction in life, driven purely by animal instincts such as sex, violence, and alcohol. On a beach with fellow Navy men, we see him climb a tree like a monkey, choppin...

“In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time,” says Mircea Eliade, a 20 th century religious historian and philosopher. Think of profane time as a worn out world, a period in which chaos has corrupted the foundation of a given space. Rituals are meant to reenact primordial deeds performed by gods during creation, bringing about a sacred space and time; the world is rediscovered, beginning anew. Moonrise Kingdom is more than a love adventure between two 12 year-old kids. Beneath what appears to be a surface of Anderson-verse silliness is a rich mythological subtext rooted in primordial ritualism that defines both the individual and the society. Beyond two kids in love, Moonrise is about a fractured community going through a rebirth. Bob Balaban’s Narrator wouldn’t go through all the trouble to tell u...

The 10s were the decade Disney studio executives hounded Pixar Animation with demands for sequels to their most lucrative properties. But that didn’t stop these independent minded artists from fighting to maintain the spirit of the company’s intent, delivering well-thought, patiently crafted original films. While Disney was getting their Incredibles 2, Cars 2 & 3, Toy Story 3 & 4, Finding Dory, and Monsters University , trailblazers like Pete Docter were focused on turning animation Inside Out , literally. Inside Out is an unconventional, kid-friendly animation dealing with childhood depression. As we know from works like Up, Coco, and WALL-E , Pixar is never unwilling to strike sensitive nerves in viewers of all ages. Whether making us cry over lost memories, or pondering the existential, Pixar is the one mainstream animation company that goes there, all the way, holding nothing back while maintaining a PG-rating. Inside Out may seem like a gentler episode of Black ...