“Film Blanc”: Shoveling Toward the Meaning of Fargo (1996)
“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.”
Category: Movies
Experimental & Underground · Festivals & Awards
All Shook Up: Australian International Experimental Film Festival 2012
“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.”
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.”
Activist & Political · Festivals & Awards
Growing Pains: The 2012 Moscow and Odessa International Film Festivals
“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.”
Lost in Space: Stunning Special Effects Can’t Obscure the Flaws in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012)
“What is human?” Scott asks. “Make us care,” the audience replies.
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Nothin’ but Legs! Fred and Cyd Go out Kicking in Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings
Sorry, folks, but this is the last dance
Girl, Spinning: Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011)
“Sadly for Lou, Margot just isn’t a long-term kind of gal. The promise of what she could have is so much more tantalizing than what she has. Daniel represents a perpetual new day, seemingly existing only at dawn for much of the film.”
Hollywood’s Recurring Dream: Myth and Fantasy in The Artist
“In the silent era, the film artifact always stands at greater or lesser remove from our sensory experience of the world, never in concordance. It is for this reason that Jean Epstein saw the coming of sound not as the fulfillment of the cinema but as its end point, drowning the fantastic world of the silent screen in what he called a ‘superabundant banality.'”
It’s Not Just a Movie, or Batman’s Face Is Our Mask
“Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” — Batman
TCM Alert! Myrna Loy Ahoy! THE BARBARIAN (1933) and PENTHOUSE (1933)
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!
Films I Saw in Andrew Sarris’ Class
Sadly, we report the death of the influential writer, teacher, and film critic, Andrew Sarris (31 October 1928 — 20 June 2012). Sarris will be remembered for bringing the[…]
Podcast Pleasures
There are all kinds, types, brands, bits and pieces of chit-chatter to plug one’s ear into should one wish to plumb the misty myths and mysteries of movies and all[…]
Bridesmaids Revisited
Last summer, in the midst of the The Hangover 2‘s disappointingly massive success, another comedy came along, which went on to become something of a triumph of box office girlpower,[…]
Dispatch from Cannes 2012 #3: David Cronenberg’s COSMOPOLIS
Here we go again. Only a few days ago we had Walter Salles’ lumbering, rigidly faithful film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Now we have David Cronenberg’s equally[…]
Dispatch from Cannes 2012 #2: Walter Salles’s ON THE ROAD
Among the great might-have-beens of cinema are Greta Garbo as Dorian Gray, Ingmar Bergman directing Barbra Streisand in The Merry Widow, Orson Welles’s The Heart of Darkness, Sergei Eisenstein’s An[…]
Sergio Leone Meets Robert De Niro Meets F. Scott Fitzgerald: Once Upon a Time in America
I was delighted to hear of the premiere at this year’s Cannes film festival of a 269-minute restored version of Sergio Leone’s final masterwork, Once Upon a Time in America (1984). I[…]
Dream Story: Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty
“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[…]
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Four Polish Cinema Classics: Innocent Sorcerers, Goodbye, See You Tomorrow, Eroica, Night Train, A Trip to the Moon, The Spiders
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
Through a Glass Darkly: On Béla Tarr’s Damnation
“You’re standing alone at the entrance to the tunnel to an enchanting world, because you know something I can’t even put a name to. Something deeper and more ruthless than even I can understand.”
Links + BSA
