Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life: An Outsider’s View
The Tree of Life seems to excite fanatical devotion. The reactions to the film heard, for example, on Filmspotting, from both the podcast’s commentators and its listeners, have an uncritical[…]
Category: Movies
Karloff/Tourneur x 2
Do you recognize this dastardly villain? It’s Boris Karloff, playing a hostile Native American in The Last of the Mohicans (1920) directed by Maurice Tourneur. The hero of the film[…]
Misery Loves Fantasy: Kim Ki-duk’s Arirang (2011)
“Kim decided to retreat into an interior world where he does not need to confront or take but where his time can be sucked up by shitting in fields, smoking fish, getting drunk, and singing.”
Desert Solitaire: On Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010)
“The sheer physical immensity of this space threatens to hijack everything else in the film, and it’s a testament to Reichardt’s directorial intelligence that she lets it, and that she makes it work as part of a larger project.”
Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Crafting Community: The 2011 QDoc International Film Festival
“It’s encouraging to see how articulate and unafraid many of the kids in Put This on the Map are in deciding who they want to be, how they want to live, and even what they want to be called: ‘Very gay,’ ‘an ally,’ ‘dating an FTM,’ ‘not straight, gay, bi, anything.'”
Space Dust: On Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
“Malick invites us to marvel at a universe created for our benefit and an afterlife in which all our cares will be resolved. The best part of the movie — Brad Pitt taunting his sons, willing them to rebel against an authority he doesn’t believe he deserves — vanishes behind a scrim of inane space flotsam, while the combination of the two endows Jack’s childhood with a world-historical weight it can’t possibly bear.”
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Laila, Alice, People on Sunday, Buster Keaton: The Short Films Collection, 1920-1923, Szindbád, Coeur Fidèle
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
Activist & Political · Reviews
Between Silence and Sound: Children of a Lesser God
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.” — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (73)
The Envelope of Time: Wrapping Up the Past in Chris Marker, Alexander Sokurov, and José Luis Guerín
“Being beautiful fights trivializing and ironization by the camera; it saves the women from being regarded as cheap or inscrutable. Elegance and glamour paradoxically grant these subjects an inner life.”
Deconstructing Sucker Punch
Like Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., Christopher Nolan’s Inception, or Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch invites the viewer to deconstruct a narrative puzzle – nested realities, stories embedded[…]
Notes on The Exile (Max Ophuls, 1947)
Producer as Auteur – The Exile is a swashbuckler, written by, produced by, and starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. It was the first American film to be completed by the German-Jewish director,[…]
Mind over Matrimony: Gay or Any Marriage Vs. Cary Grant
Proud as I am of New York for approving gay marriage (see my dissection of THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT, here) I can’t help but see marriage itself as some[…]
Notes on a Slow Zoom: Robert Altman’s 3 WOMEN (1977)
Standing in an aquarium with his arms outstretched, the Creature from the Black Lagoon makes a cameo appearance in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, but his presence is anything but gratuitous. Like everything else in[…]
The Hotel Maid who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
Anyone who’s seen any of the GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO movies must surely notice the similarities between Strauss-Kahn and the unsavory sex addicted pervs in high places that are the targets of our avenging heroine, Lisbeth Salander.
Dispatches from Cannes 2011 #3: Le Gamin au Velo (The Kid with a Bike)
DATELINE CANNES, May 18, 2011. The films of Belgian brothers Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne give new meaning to the term motion picture. Their protagonists are continually on the move,[…]
Dispatches from Cannes 2011 #2: Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
DATELINE CANNES, May 13, 2011. On approaching a Terrence Malick film, it has seemed impossible to avoid mentioning the long gaps between the films (20 years between Days of Heaven[…]
Dispatches from Cannes 2011: #1: Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris
DATELINE CANNES, May 13, 2011: When watching Woody Allen movies in the past, I was always reminded of a remark John Updike makes of one of his characters: “He thought[…]
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: A Blonde in Love, The Lighthouse, The Clowns, Senso, Our Hospitality, William S. Burroughs: The Man Within
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
Asian · Comedy · Festivals & Awards
The New-Style Comedy: Wai Ka-Fai and the Hong Kong International Film Festival (2011)
“This wonderfully flexible approach to movie-making explains why Wai and To’s films seem so alive to every implication — unlike most current U.S. comedies, where directors carefully steer around obstacles and pretend not to notice flaws in the set-up.”
Cinemas of Poetry and Violence: The 40th International Film Festival Rotterdam (2010)
Rotterdam’s edge is intact despite increasing hints of commercialism
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