“Kahaani captures this moment of rising disillusionment and change in the world. There is no ‘riding-into-the-sunset’ happy ending, for Vidya still remains an unhappy widow at the close of the movie: perhaps an appropriate resolution for these angsty times.”
“Who’d of thunk there was a fake Mae West?”
Activist & Political · Festivals & Awards
“Peter Greenaway’s theses on the death of cinema perhaps inspired the greatest discussion at the Odessa festival: his insistent repetition that cinema was dead but that the screen is very much alive was received as an interesting provocation but didn’t convince many.”
“Is emotional capacity, as figured by film, an entity of fixed dimension, so that if men are represented as more caring, women must be represented as caring less?”
“Though most people in earlier times could not even have imagined the present role of science and technology, nor, even more implausibly, the apparently alternate life offered by the cinema and its recent offshoots, the human imagination refused to be tied down.”
“Where many people watch a film for a true or faithful rendition of an historical event, I needed confirmation that the thing I was viewing was . . . made up!”
“What is human?” Scott asks. “Make us care,” the audience replies.
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Sorry, folks, but this is the last dance
“Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” — Batman
“The final result of this pretentiousness is The Dark Knight Rises, a Batman film in name only, a joyless endeavor that ignores its heritage and puts on airs to conceal the half-baked politics and juvenile head games hiding behind its dark and scowling mask.”
“In Fargo, a milieu of livid pettiness and stunted lives, capitalist migraines, and psychotic rampages prevails beneath the veneer of cheesy, Norman Rockwellian Middle America.”
Experimental & Underground · Festivals & Awards
“Despite this titillated vision, we experience a slight distance as a result of the period fashions and bodies — the women appear relatively natural and unsculpted by today’s standards.”
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Genres
A New Solution to Herbert Marcuse’s Old Riddle
Long thought lost, Stevens’ grim exposé of gender roles and sexual psychopathy may be the missing link in noir’s transition to the sixties.
If Zita Johan went off into the Gary Cooper Morocco desert with Valentino as a stud MUMMY and there was 50 SHADES OF GREY UN-PC whipping and dominance head games Stockholm Syndrome romance, well that gives you some of the plot. PRE-CODE RULEZ!
Exploitation & Erotica · SF & Fantasy
If you’re excited about the promos for the Ridley Scott science fiction movie coming out this summer, Prometheus… it might be a good time to visit some of the films that have been mentioned over the years as the inspirations for ALIEN, and it just so happens they’re all pretty short and all available on Netflix streaming – a perfect weekend triple bill.
“The Story of O and Traumnovelle are two tales of outrageous sex that nevertheless come across as lulling and gentle. Sleeping Beauty deserves to be ranked with those works, in[…]
“The morally complex interrelationship of hero/villain, which is partially accountable for the remarkable intensity of his films, has at its roots the film noirs of the 1940s. The darker side of human nature, the interiority of these earlier, psychologically troubled characters, is the determining force in Mann’s noirs. We see the director striving for the depth and complexity of characterization he ultimately achieved in the great films of the 1950s.”
Directors · Genres · Noir · Westerns
“Mann’s 1950 threesome — The Devil’s Doorway, Winchester ’73, The Furies — was the most auspicious quantum jump by an American director since John Ford’s equivalent Americana triumvirate of 1939 (Stage Coach, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk) lifted him into the major phase of his career. Yet Mann’s achievements seem destined to remain unappreciated and the director himself obscure.”
