Father of His Country: Spielberg’s Lincoln
Great drama often depends on the playwright’s ability to select (or invent) a fateful day or two in his hero’s life that symbolically sums him up and enables him to[…]
Category: Movies
WALTZES FROM VIENNA (Alfred Hitchcock 1934)
Notwithstanding the absence of spy plots, murders, or homicidal maniacs, WALTZES FROM VIENNA is very much a film by Alfred Hitchcock. It was co-scripted by his wife, Alma Reville. It displays[…]
Documentaries · Essays · Reviews
Fourth Moments in the Atacama Desert: On Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light
“To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past — which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day.” – from “On the Concept of History” by Walter Benjamin
Uncle Sam’s Love Letter: Samuel Fuller’s Park Row on DVD
“If you can get past all these potentially off-putting deviations, Park Row offers Samuel Fuller at his most free, exuberant, and even experimental. As unfocused as the narrative is, it is essentially a realist fable, or collection of fables, condensing an entire rough-and-tumble era into a coincidence-riddled pill.”
Dead in the Water: On Samuel Fuller’s Butchered Shark! (1969)
“From now on we’ll do everything together. Just one big, happy family — father [helps up Mallare], daughter [puts his arm around Anna], and son-of-a-bitch [points to himself].” — from the film
“Human Frailty Swallowed Whole”: On Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort (1981)
“A purely political reading of Southern Comfort does not account for the fact that Hill is as much a visual stylist as he is a storyteller. Or rather, it does not account for the manner in which he tells his stories through his style, which happens to be more finely attuned to the spare poetics of male action cinema than any other American filmmaker of his generation.”
Noir · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
Technocratic Totalitarianism: One-Dimensional Thought in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville
“The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.” — Herbert Marcuse
Nine Techniques for the Bad Viewer: A Manifesto
“Immerse yourself: you should never exist outside a movie.”
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Das Weib des Pharao, Confidence, The Navigator, Casa de Lava
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
18 Days and the “Montage of History”: The People of the Egyptian Revolution
“We become faced with the individuality and humanity of history, the functioning components of a movement. 18 Days translates this reality of individual experience to film, in a sense presenting the audience with 10 YouTube clips of people affected by the revolution, telling their stories.”
Waving the Algerian Flag: The 50th Anniversary Algerian Sidebar at the 2012 Abu Dhabi Film Festival
“Probably the only film that dwarfs the spectacle of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Chronicle also challenges that British hero’s often chilly pathology with its own surge of powerfully accruing life-and-death incidents in the survival struggles of farmer Ahmed.”
Festivals & Awards · Uncategorized
Experimental Faces: The Melbourne International Film Festival 2012
“Faust’s obsession is his lust for a pale girl who looks underage, referred to as a ‘little doll,’ the only pure thing in a foul society. The desire to corrupt that girl is his version of mastering the world.”
Actors & Personalities · Reviews · Westerns
Carl Foreman’s and Fred Zinneman’s High Noon: Kelly versus Jurado! The Ultimate Face-Off!
O to be torn, ‘twixt love and duty
Straight arrow? Not Exactly. Jennifer Lawrence in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games
Why do lesbians have to be so boring?
Pushing Limits: On Crime, Bollywood, and Kahaani
“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.”
Norwegian Nihilism: On Joachim Trier’s Oslo August 31st
“Yet the film itself also hints at a way of being that exists outside of this paradigm, one that abandons the search for universal truth and instead prioritizes immediate phenomenological experience.”
Chump’s Ticket: BED OF ROSES (1933), SMART WOMAN (1931)
“Who’d of thunk there was a fake Mae West?”
The Essence of Television: The Irresistibility of Chauncey Gardner
“The beauty of Being There‘s satire lies in the strategy of depicting both television and its effects in a single man whose personality absorbs friend and foe, combines idiocy and[…]
Nothing Is Moving: Resnais and Slow Cinema at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Czech Republic, 2012
“Finally, the actors sit before a screen which plays a minimalist version of Eurydice: what will be on the other side of this already unreal scenario?” (on Resnais’ You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet)
“Say Yes, Say Yes to Everything”: On Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes (1955)
“She is free to ‘move,’ but never escapes being trapped by whatever role she plays, whether in real life or in a performance that represents her life.”
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