Michelle Orange

Bio: Michelle Orange is the author of This Is Running for Your Life, forthcoming from FSG. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nation, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Times, the Village Voice, Movieline and other publications.

Latest Articles:

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Cliché-ridden 'Gangster Squad' is little more than a garish genre wank

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There’s just something about gangsters and Hollywood: they like it; it likes them. Gangster movies have been inbreeding this love for generations, producing one golden child—a Chinatown, Goodfellas, Untouchables, or L.A. Confidential—for every litter of cross-eyed duds. The best that can be said for Gangster Squad is that it secures, for now, the position of alpha dud, the fedora-capped king of clichés. It’s less a gangster movie than a gangster mutation with tommy-gun Tourette’s. More

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By Michelle Orange

on January 11th, 2013 3:50pm

 
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'56 Up,' the latest in Michael Apted's series, confronts middle age and what it means to make a life

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The Up project was conceived to render and compare a small group in broad strokes. Some Victorian residue clings to the idea that a life should be determined by accidents of birth or the marriage one makes. But there is also something of the modern fondness for defining life in terms of milestones nailed and five-year plans in the structure of the series, which mixes pop philosophy (“Give me a child until he is seven,” the voice-of-God narrator intones in the first program, “and I will give you the man”) and social studies with a healthy dose of voyeurism. More

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By Michelle Orange

on January 4th, 2013 4:26pm

 
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'Django Unchained,' Tarantino's manic, masterful mashup of cinematic and very real brutality

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This year American history was beautifully backlit and exquisitely argued in Lincoln; tersely annotated and faithfully reenacted in Zero Dark Thirty; and now, with Django Unchained, it gets hand-cranked through Quentin Tarantino’s imagination, which is to say through a mirrored palace of movie cameras, projectors, eyeballs, and screens, each one aimed askew and operating at full tilt. It may never walk the same way again. More

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By Michelle Orange

on December 31st, 2012 12:08pm

 
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Kathryn Bigelow's 'Zero Dark Thirty': nearly as evasive as its subject

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Perhaps evoking anger is what Bigelow and her screenwriting collaborator Mark Boal (the pair’s last film, the fervently, bafflingly esteemed Hurt Locker, won them both Oscars) had in mind. I’m still not sure. The two have been sticking to their blandly evasive story of intent: the idea, they say, was to mingle journalism and entertainment, revealing recent, largely classified events to a vested public in neutral, experiential terms. But where its sympathies aren’t obvious, Zero Dark Thirty’s pretense of a strict, presentational style is undermined by the subject matter, so that context, subtext, and sequence swell to fill the film’s meticulous gaps in character, meaning, and moral perspective. More

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By Michelle Orange

on December 19th, 2012 11:56am

 
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In ‘Rust and Bone,’ Marion Cotillard provides the center for an overextended narrative

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Jacques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet) pours classic themes into less familiar shapes, often using a heightened style to elide his weak points, which tend to involve overly figurative characters and overdetermined plot. He shrinks the big stories he likes to tell down to the scale in which he likes to tell them, with some elements making the transition better preserved than others. More

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By Michelle Orange

on November 26th, 2012 3:20pm

 
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Spielberg's 'Lincoln' is the schoolbook president, but it's the story we want, and a tribute to his greatest work

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Particularly this week, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln bears interest for displaying political figures that actually get something done. For this alone it might be worth a look, and indeed in its duller moments Lincoln is best recommended as a stately reflecting pool. Considering the grandness of the subject, the grandiloquence of the director, and the shackles of the form, this is no surprise. More unexpected is that Lincoln manages to get free of those shackles, briefly and incompletely, perhaps, but well enough to make its story new. More

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By Michelle Orange

on November 9th, 2012 12:59pm

 
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Olivia Thirlby plays the ingenue and discovers women's betrayals and connections

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Nobody Walks is not concerned with girlhood or sisterhood or any of the other hoods, and might easily be mistaken for a story about what men do to women. Instead it attempts to illuminate the hidden designs that bind women in a world defined by the demands and indifferences of men. It’s a kinship expressed through its alienations: the things we imagine together but refuse to share, the ways we betray and become each other in a self-enforced, and secret, feminine solitude. More

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By Michelle Orange

on October 19th, 2012 10:39am

 
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Director Andrea Arnold explains her appropriately bleak, if imperfect, 'Wuthering Heights'

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“I know you want to go home and cry in your beer,” Arnold said, thanking those who remained after the credits. “So do I.” Instead she submitted, in highly quotable style, to questioning about this singular, perspective-driven interpretation of a well-known story. Her answers were playfully but determinedly pitched against the notion of some stable or authoritative vision for the film: Who really knows why they do the things they do, creatively or otherwise? More

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By Michelle Orange

on October 5th, 2012 11:32am

 
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Sci-fi shoot-'em-up 'Looper' is a canny cascade of time-travel-film allusions

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Allusion reverberates throughout Looper, which moves from Breathless to Blade Runner and back in a neon flash cut. Looper's most basic lift is also its biggest: the premise is that of a quintessential twentieth century time travel movie, which is to say it derives Chris Marker's 1962 La jetée, in which a character skips back a few decades to try and prevent a modern apocalypse. Of course this is also to say Looper derives from Terry Gilliam's 1995 film 12 Monkeys, itself lifted more directly from La jetée. And yet it is Johnson's melée that is more conspicuously under the influence—of jetée and many others. The effect is too obvious not to aspire to something original: the first postmodern time travel movie. More

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By Michelle Orange

on September 28th, 2012 2:05pm

 
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A documentary on Diana Vreeland, goddess of 20th-century fabulousness

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Although the first line of her 1983 autobiography proclaims her loathing for nostalgia, in The Eye Has to Travel Vreeland is shown reveling in her own good timing, from being born before Europe fell (“It was the Belle Époque!”) to coming of age just as women were bobbing their hair and their skirts for the first time in modern history (“It was the Roaring Twenties!”) to reaching her professional, taste-making pinnacle during a decade of social and cultural revolution (“I loved the Sixties—that was the youthquake!”). It feels telling that the last coinage is Vreeland’s own, a term she used to accompany a 1965 profile of young Edie Sedgwick from her high priestess perch at Vogue. More

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By Michelle Orange

on September 21st, 2012 11:35am