Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Hitchcock’s Shadow: On Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take
“The doubled Hitchcock mirrors the Hitchcock double, who in turn reflects Hitchcock pretending to play himself.”
Category: Genres
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Pierre Etaix: Revisiting a Forgotten Master
“The man’s a genius!” —Jerry Lewis
The Sound of Silence: The 2010 San Francisco Silent Film Festival
“Even the most obscure titles drew impressive crowds, and the premiere events boasted sold-out houses.”
Directors · Interviews · Music & Musicals
Family Remains: An Interview with Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler on Documenting Fishbone in Everyday Sunshine
“Being middle-age rock and rollers, just trying to pay the bills, isn’t an easy lifestyle.”
Interviews · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
Back to the Futuristic: An Interview with Bill Warren
In which the author talks about being a lifelong SF movie freak and updating his seminal SF compendium Keep Watching the Skies! for the new millennium
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
Paging Groucho! Notes on Morrie Ryskind and HUAC
“Being Marxist in the Groucho rather than Karl sense would have required the Ten to not take themselves or their politics so seriously.”
Things Fall Apart: On The Wild Bunch and Contemporary Westerns
“There remain only intimations of squalor and suffering, of rough beasts stumbling across the landscape without any stability or security in sight.”
Perverse Pianists: How They Do It
“Aldridge’s shoot is so striking because it purports to discover glamour in the mind of an unhinged woman: an associative path that has been cut by cinema.”
Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
History, Herstory, Our Story: The 2010 QDoc International Film Festival in Portland, Oregon
“She had a lot of action inside!”
The New Lurid: Cinema’s Rape Disavowal Fantasy
“They rapin” everybody out here.” — Antoine Dodson
Sanshiro Sugata: Kurosawa’s Elegy for the Reluctant Kamikaze
“Sanshiro is ultimately after spiritual gain — to achieve the purity he found in the moonlit flower.”
SF & Fantasy · Thrillers & Action
“Let’s Call It a Draw”: M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender
“Most of the major speaking roles are indeed pwned by people without color, to put it indelicately. But the rest are thankfully brought to life by a rainbow coalition of talent.”
Multiple Senses: Tom Ford’s A Single Man
“Ford creates a unique cinematic experience in which the visual, the aural, and even the olfactory mix to produce a powerful synesthetic experience.”
Counterculture · Essays · SF & Fantasy
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”: Avatar’s Psychedelic Fantasy
“What entertains us may be shaping us.”
Experimental & Underground · Memoir
Spade Work: Four Autobiographies and an Elegy: My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2008); Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2007); Hommage (Jean-Marie Téno, 1985); Gloria! (Hollis Frampton, 1979); and (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)
“Because they assume that memory is fallible and experience inassimilable, they’re more like inquests or excavations than diaries or memoirs. Instead of reminiscing, they dig.”
Dreamtime – Inception vs. Secrets of a Soul (G.W. Pabst 1926)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df1CGxqS1MA] Nine out of ten bloggers agree – the dreams in Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION are not particularly dream-like, at least, not much more so than the action sequences in your average[…]
The Last Airbender: The Most (Incomplete) Fantastic Journey
Talk about wish fulfillment for kids – the Airbender mythos has it nailed. As a child dreams of gaining superpowers, he may wish for them all: i.e, the numerous abilities of[…]
Jonah Hex-ing the Western
Call this a western exploitation film. Jonah Hex, based on a comic book series of the same name, has much more action than thought or sense. It borrows from the[…]
New Film from “Triplets” Director
Hand-drawn animation, once the mainstay of Disney and other studios that created “cartoons” for popular consumption, is becoming something of a lost art. Audiences seem to prefer Pixar-style CGI. Disney[…]
Metropolis: Restored, Reborn, and Rolling Out
In his nonfiction text On Writing, Stephen King describes the artist’s work as telepathy. Hardly the new-age type, King is referring to how thoughts can transmit though a quiet practice[…]
Links + BSA
