Spike Lee’s “Uniquely American [Di]vision”: Race and Class in 25th Hour
“Is it simply that the hero must be white for a mainstream American audience to care for him, or for the mainstream critical establishment to value Lee’s work?”
Robert Ryan: A Moon for the Misbegotten
“I have been in films pretty well everything I am dedicated to fighting against.”
Lysergic Landscapes: John Maybury’s Read Only Memory
“Story, characters, and other reassuring elements are simply obliterated by what appears to be Maybury’s elaborate private mythology.”
Sinners’ Holiday: An Ode to Pre-Code
“Code? What Code?”
Dizzy from the Altitude, Happy to Plummet: Pre-Code Cinema and the Post-Code-Shock Syndrome
“The air is saturated with their feelings for each other as they listen to ‘the distant music of the falls,’ the same falls, of course, that will threaten to kill her.”
Jean-Pierre Melville, Director: Notes on the French Auteur’s Career
“The film was shot in what would become a blueprint for the director’s production style — without authorization, studio resources, or sufficient funds.”
Activist & Political · Directors · Interviews
Maps and Movies: Talking with Deepa Mehta
“I think it’s really important for you, or anybody who wants to be a filmmaker, to really be honest with yourself.”
Hotels and Homelands: After Ken and Rosa
Neither will be the same
Griffith’s Great American Pastoral: Location and Meaning in Way Down East
“The air is saturated with their feelings for each other as they listen to ‘the distant music of the falls,’ the same falls, of course, that will threaten to kill her.”
Liverpool Lullaby: On Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City
“Through cinema the past is regained.”
Activist & Political · Documentaries
What Is Cheaper Than Nothing at All? Czech Dream, Culture Jamming, and Consumerism
“I jam because I am without ID.”
Out of His Head: Metaphysical Escape Attempts in the Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman
“Kaufman’s homunculi schema is an implicit mockery of our bottomless ignorance of the nature of consciousness.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Looking at Charlie: City Lights: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“If you could only see me as I really am, not as I appear but as I really am, as I am in my heart.”
John Cassavetes: The First Dogme Director?
“The major point of convergence between Cassavetes and the Dogme movement is an oppositional realist form that blurs the boundaries between being and performing.”
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: The General, Douglas Fairbanks Silents, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Fighters, Real Money, Lady with the Dog
The General (Buster Keaton, 1926) Transferred from a print struck from the original camera negative, Kino’s recent two-disc presentation of The General looks shockingly new, as if Keaton had shot[…]
“Oh Mary, Don’t Ask”: The Boys in the Band on DVD
“In the ensuing post-Stonewall civil rights struggles, The Boys in the Band became crazy Aunt Betty locked in the attic when guests came over.”
Books: Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema
Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, by Geneviève Sellier. Translated by Kristin Ross. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Paperback, $22.95, 280pp. ISBN: 0822341921. When it comes to feminist film[…]
Books: The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory
The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory, by Patricia Pisters. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Cloth $60.00, Paper $26.95, 307pp. ISBN: 0-8047-4028-3. In contemporary film[…]
Reflections Through a Golden Nigh: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
“Like Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam, or the Scott brothers Ridley and Tony, Fincher is an auteur-facile, an auteur of illusory depth.”
Of Bullies and Blood Drinkers: Talking to Tomas Alfredson about Let the Right One In
“I think the most horrifying images are the ones you make yourself. Is there someone standing behind the door, or is it just two shoes standing there?”
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