When the late, great website The Dissolve ended operations, it’s commenting community had The Solute to call home, but the staff and writers of The Dissolve have been scattered to the winds of the Internet. With Dissolve On, we collect some of the essential film writing being done by these essential film writers. Because there’s always a Dissolver writing something notable about the movies (and occasionally other stuff) somewhere on the Internet.  

These folks are talented and prolific, so please share the pieces we missed in the comments!

 

Charles Bramesco contrasts the box-office failure of We Are Your Friends with the box-office success of War Room for Forbes:

“The hotly anticipated Zac Efron vehicle We Are Your Friends opened to an embarrassing $1.8 million debut across a whopping 2,333 theaters…(while) the surprise breakout of the weekend was a little film called War Room, which netted $11 million over its first weekend in release…

Films with a profile as low as War Room‘s don’t tend to put up numbers like this; it simply doesn’t happen without a star, an aggressive ad campaign, or some good old-fashioned controversy, and War Room lacks all three. Which naturally poses the question: how did some film that barely existed before this weekend roundly trounce a major studio release with an A-list star and a premise custom-fitted to contemporary youth tastes? Contrary to prevailing industry wisdom, the answer has nothing to do with what is ‘in’ right now, and everything to do with who actually goes to the movies.”

 

Scott Tobias on Jacques Démy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort for Oscilloscope Labs’ Musings:

“Both a part of and apart from his French New Wave brethren, Démy directed deceptively bright confections that carry themselves lightly, but are more troubled under the surface than they might appear. With 1964’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and 1967’s The Young Girls of Rochefort, Démy paid homage to the American movie musicals with much the same vigor as his contemporaries in the movement embraced and reconfigured American genre pictures. What comes through in both films is the purity of emotion that the musical affords: private desires expressed openly and vigorously, the joys of courtship, and love requited, popping off like starbursts in the choreography.  The songs express a desire for love, but fate doesn’t guarantee its realization—and beyond that, there’s no certainty that one’s romantic ideal will last forever. Life is complicated. Circumstances intervene.”

 

Tasha Robinson on A Walk In The Woods for AV Club:

“In spite of (successful non-fiction writer who uses humor to address science, travel, and linguistics Bill) Bryson’s gentle tolerance for (his long-estranged, out-of-shape, fundamentally lazy old buddy Stephen) Katz and all the other obstacles on his road, the script still has an off-puttingly sour contempt for the world. Bryson was in his 40s when he attempted the trail; Redford is a well-preserved 79, and Nolte is 74, which makes A Walk In The Woods feel more like an irascible Grumpy Old Men-style senior-citizen outing than the midlife-crisis movie it seems to be aiming for. And Redford can’t compensate for the ugly, snide streak running throughout the entire film, especially when it deals with women.”

 

Keith Phipps on the late, great Wes Craven for Rolling Stone:

“After a period working in the sleazier sections of the New York film industry, Craven made his directorial debut with Last House on the Left (1972), whose poster and trailer featured the famous tagline, “To avoid fainting, just keep telling yourself, ‘It’s only a movie. It’s only a movie.'” Yet part of what makes this grindhouse landmark so unnerving even today is how easy to forget it is a movie — or at least a fiction film made by professionals. Inspired by the chaos of the Vietnam War era in general and Charles Manson in particular, Last House follows a pair of teenagers as they’re kidnapped and tormented by a gang of criminals; one pair of parents then exact some equally vicious payback on the perpetrators. A loose remake of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (but with a much bleaker ending), the film is made all the more effective by its low-budget and technical limitations. It plays less like a horror movie than evidence of a crime, an example of the awfulness and inevitability of violence.”

 

Noel Murray on the documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution for AV Club:

“Stanley Nelson’s absorbing, provocative documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution measures how much and how little has changed since Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale co-founded the Panthers in Oakland in 1966. Nelson spent nearly a decade compiling interviews with dozens of former members (plus a handful of cops who tussled with the party back in the 1960s) and combed through news archives and government records. The result is an impressively detailed explication of how quickly the Black Panthers rose and fell…

Vanguard Of The Revolution suggests that if the Panthers could’ve held together and stayed on message, they might’ve won more allies, just by exposing one of the persistent hypocrisies of American society: how everyone says they’re for freedom, until the wrong people start to enjoy it.”

 

Nathan Rabin kicks of a new ongoing feature with a re-examination of Grandma’s Boy for Rotten Tomatoes:

“Grandma’s Boy has a wonderfully endearing quality that later Happy Madison productions would fatally lack: it likes its characters and invites audiences to share that affection, instead of treating its characters like the worst kind of human garbage. It’s a much better vehicle for Swardson than Bucky Larson: Born To Be A Star, and while his emotionally stunted virgin falls squarely into Swardson’s well-wrought persona as a Manic Pixie Nightmare Boy, he emerges as a funny, likable character who is even afforded a moment of triumph when he absolutely destroys at a game of Dance Dance Revolution…Grandma’s Boy is wonderfully inclusive in its comedy; it’s the kind of film where, with the notable exception of J.P., damn near everyone gets laid, damn near everyone smokes weed, everyone plays video games, and everyone has friends who like them, no matter how geeky or socially inept they might be.”

 

Rachel Handler has been, and will continue, writing some weekend news pieces, like this one on Jonathan Demme making a Justin Timberlake music-film, for Vanity Fair:

“(Demme) does add, “There’s tremendous dancing in this piece. He’s got an extraordinary band called the Tennessee Kids. Huge horn section, two lead guitars, two drummers, eight dancers, four exquisite background singers.” Of Timberlake himself, Demme adds, “He’s a funky Fred Astaire!”

Demme is certainly using a lot of exclamation points for a director responsible for The Silence Of The Lambs and Philadelphia. But it’s important to remember that Demme is also responsible for 1984’s Talking Heads “rockumentary” Stop Making Sense, as well as concert films for Kenny Chesney and Neil Young. Does Jonathan Demme contradict himself? Very well, then Jonathan Demme contradicts himself. He contains multitudes.”