Lone Rangers: Using Terror to Publicize “Revolution”
From the margins, both a “crazy man” and visionary artists can ask: How can leaders govern when language has been debased and words no longer have true meaning? * *[…]
Category: Genres
Into the Deep: Reflections on Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013)
The dominant image from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is that of an opaque pool of black liquid, into which sink a variety of men who have fallen victim[…]
Recent DVD and Blu-ray Releases from Flicker Alley: The House of Mystery, Dziga Vertov, Joan the Woman, The Marriage Circle
The House of Mystery (Volkoff, 1921-23), Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera and Other Restored Works (Vertov, 1924-1934), Joan the Woman (DeMille, 1916), and The Marriage Circle (Lubitsch,[…]
Notes on a Stupid Dinosaur Movie: Jurassic World and the Hollywood Blockbuster
Once a film gives up on originality, it immediately descends into nihilism. Whatever sensory pleasures such a film may offer, the underlying assumption is that the entire experience is empty[…]
Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
Film: An Adaptive Species. Part 1 of 2: Between a Book and a Hard Place
Lincoln (2012) & Wolf Hall (2015)/Les Miserables (1933) & Great Expectations (1946/2012) * * * So, notwithstanding humanist art or realistic biography, we go on hurting each other. “Everybody hurts,” as[…]
Bringing Day to Night: The Resurrection of The Night of the Hunter
“It’s really a nightmarish Mother Goose story.”1 – Charles Laughton, director Given the above description, any initial box office success for The Night of the Hunter (1955) was likely to[…]
Boyhood: When Art Is Just Winging It
When the technology of transmitting typed words or smartphone photos and GoPro filming accompanies our every movement and all this runs far ahead of thought, a culture leaves behind both[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Essays · Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
Sexual Confusion, the Attractions of Moral Chaos, and the Contrarieties of Personality: Navigating the Vagaries of Fellini Satyricon (1969)
He was the spectator at his own drama, like a person at a play he doesn’t understand. – Victor Hugo1 “On the other hand, I don’t want to do Petronius[…]
The American Hubris Cycle: A Survey of Recent Survival Narratives and Friends as Collateral Damage
I will focus on films that contain both of the following markers: (1) an American character exhibits daring but reckless behavior, which triggers continuing, gory disaster for a multinational group;[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Better Endings: QDoc: Portland’s Ninth Queer Documentary Film Festival (May 14-17, 2015)
“It’s time to give her story a better ending,” says Jane Anderson in her documentary Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson, speaking of her great[…]
Slave Runner: Genetic Engineering, Slavery, and Immortality in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982)
In a dehumanised world it is therefore the replicants who are keener to live, love, and be free. This is another important issue that the film raises: who is actually[…]
Plissken on Parade: Escape from New York (1981) Comes to Blu-ray
So even if you aren’t nostalgic for the heady sense of danger and decadence, do yourself a favor and crash the pod down into Carpenter country – an alternate reality[…]
Approaching and Transcending the Limit: The Experience of Death and Possibilities of Renewal in Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light and Dreyer’s Ordet
Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. Once out of[…]
The Line, The Eye: Yves Saint Laurent on Film
Mesmerizing designs pull our eyes away from the tiresome demands of history, but Bonello doesn’t portray Yves as an escapist. Instead, he suggests that we cannot assume a straightforward relation[…]
The Plot Genre Revolution: Or, Why the Western Isn’t a Genre
Fortunately for those of us who like distinct and finite categories, the number of plot genres is limited in this formulation by the narrow scope of human desires: find love,[…]
Directors · Interviews · Middle East
Iranian Independent Cinema, Its Challenges and Future: An Interview with Abdolreza Kahani
I have made films both in Iran and France, so I know the conditions. In France, when funding is given, there are no strings attached to it. You are free[…]
Weary Shadow: Considering The Conformist (Bertolucci, 1970)
What’s in the bag is Marcello Clerici, and the bag, not surprisingly, is empty. * * * Upon its release in 1970, how many of us were prepared for The[…]
Historical & Epic · Producers & Studios · War
“War Brings Out What People Really Are”: Hell’s Angels Reconsidered
Introduction Hell’s Angels, Howard Hughes’s 1930 film, was praised for its aerial photography and derided for its story. “War Brings Out What People Really Are” surveys critical films Hollywood produced[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Interviews
“The World of the Road Is a State of Exception”: Boris Lojkine’s Hope Explores the World of African Migrants
Hope is the title, half ironic, half resolutely sincere, of a stunning film about African migrants trekking across a continent’s most forbidding landscapes to reach the promised land of Europe.[…]
52 Shades of Gone: Gone, Goner, Gone-est Girl
Every failure, every road not taken is a Gone Girl all its own, Regular Amy’s story a machine for the draining away of these idealizations till she and we are[…]
Links + BSA
