This week’s TCM pre-code musts: BOMBSHELL, ONE WAY PASSAGE, CITY STREETS
Murders are talked over via close-ups of cat statues, and a very dirty fella named Blackie gets offed by Guy Kibee (as you’ve never seen him before!).
Category: Genres
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Strike, Red Psalm, The Phantom Carriage, Meek’s Cutoff, Go West, Battling Butler
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
The Way That You Use It: Reassessing The Color of Money in the Scorsese Canon
“This film is about process, about transitory states, about the journey in between the grimy Chicago pool halls that serve as Vince and Eddie’s intellectual and physical training grounds.”
“Filled with Ritual”: Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited
“[B]ecause the story is filled with ritual and religion, we were always going into temples. I was particularly obsessed with participating in any religious ceremonies I could get involved with.” — Wes Anderson, on the making of The Darjeeling Limited
Exit Through the Gift Shop: Cavemen to the Right
“Are we watching a faux-documentary within an entertainment vehicle? One suspects only Banksy knows. And he’s too busy painting to tell us.”
Religious Allegory and Cultural Discomfort in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky: And Why Larry Crowne Is One of the Best Films of 2011
“You can laugh while Rome is burning, but believe you me, Poppy, it is burning, and if you don’t wake up, then you will be burnt to a cinder . . . I mean, look around you. What do you see? Do you see a policy of bringing happiness to people?” — Scott in Happy-Go-Lucky
Burning the Candle at Both Ends: Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies (2010)
“There are truths that can only be revealed on condition of having been discovered.”– Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies (2003)
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
When We Dream, Do We Accumulate Capital? On Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010)
“Nolan is making evident, both through form and narrative, his criticism of the sweeping radicalization of cinematic work that has privileged the technological wonder of the movies over formulations of innovative and complex narratives that deal with human existence.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
Ernie Kovacs: An American Secret
“Ernie’s contract is reported to contain a clause forbidding him ever to consult a psychiatrist. The network is afraid if he ever became normal he’d be ruined.” — Dorothy Kilgallen
The Perverse Privilege of Degradation: American Politics in the Age of Assimilation
A Final Statement of the Obvious
On Dangerous Ground: Some Noteworthy “Moving Camera Movies” of 2010
Whether neo-noir or horror, underexposed or ignored, several films of 2010 employed devilishly motivated moving camera to disturbing effect.
Pseudo-Innocence and Encased Fantasies: Inside the Unconscious of the National Rifle Association
“I like this exhibit . . . it’s very familiar.”
Going to Alaska: Vision Quests, Quasi-Indians, and Great Escapes on the Last Frontier
“He said he might not survive, and ended with the ritual declaration: ‘I now walk into the wild.’ Civilization had ‘poisoned’ him, but the best of civilization gave him words to describe both what he was fleeing, and what he intended to embrace.”
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Uncategorized
Fractured Synthesis: The Blender Aesthetic of Outsider filmmaker Bob Moricz
“Moricz’s work assaults the viewer with a whiplash barrage of familiar plot lines, trite turning points, and cliché characters spouting simultaneously banal and inflated rhetorical dialogue, all infusing narratives propelled by a poignant and urgent anxiety derived from the tensions of everyday life.”
Halloween Film Guide to: Kali Chthonian Feminine Subtext
For the Halloween devouring Other in you: Here’s a small sampling of films for inciting you or your other to an orgy of castration and Kali-esque bloodletting…
Fantasia (1940): The Varieties of Religious Experience
Walt Disney’s masterpiece, Fantasia, may seem at first like a random collection of animated shorts whose only common factor is that each was inspired by a well-known piece of classical[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Docurama Bizarra: MELLODRAMA; ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM
A documentary on the weird world of Ohioans keeping dangerous wild animals as pets (it’s legal there), this film couldn’t be more timely in the light of recent events
Documentaries · Reviews · TV & Streaming
Wham! Bam! Islam!
[Editor’s note: Wham! Bam! Islam! plays on PBS on Thursday, Oct. 13 as part of its estimable Independent Lens series. Check local listings for time.] In July 2010, Dr. Naif[…]
TCM Musts: 12:15 AM EST tonight – THE GLASS KEY (1942)
It’s not ‘rare’ by TCM standards, but its not easily available on DVD, so hey – you should maybe DV-R this if you haven’t already and then keep it[…]
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