Re-viewing Reviews

Occasionally you read something in a film review that makes you look a second time.  Did I read that right?

For instance, in Kurt Loder's review of the film Nebraska we get this:

[Director Alexander] Payne has shot the film in widescreen black-and-white, a format that inevitably recalls such great ’70s movies as Badlands and The Last Picture Show.

I don't know if its inevitable it'll remind you of The Last Picture Show (didn't remind me) but I don't see why would it remind you of Badlands, shot memorably in color.

By the way, Loder goes on to state the film makes the streets of a small Nebraska town look oppressive, but, as often happens to me, I felt it looked sort of beautiful in barren black and white.

Weirder, in a Robert Blanco USA Today feature called "A tale of two series...", where he compares the faltering Homeland to the solid Good Wife, we get this:

[In Homeland t]he mystery we had to solve was whether Brody's suffering had turned him into a terrorist. But rather than ending the story, the solution led us to more interesting questions. Considering what he had been through, could you blame him? And considering what some of his enemies had done, could you root against him?

Could you blame him?  Yes!  Sure, he was put through torture and mind games by his captors, but he came back to America a terrorist. He strapped a bomb to himself hoping to blow up civilians.  I sure can blame him, and had no trouble rooting against him (and for Carrie Mathison, who suspected him).