In Love with Liv Who Loves Life: Surviving Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf
“If the demons leave, maybe the angels will too” All happy artists — to subvert Tolstoy’s dictum about families — are different, each in their own way, but all unhappy[…]
Category: Movies
Crack Christ: The Excess and the Ecstasy of Bad Lieutenant
“Lord, my Lord! How true it is that whoever work for you is paid in troubles.” ~ St. Teresa of Avila Junkies and saints know about giving. After shooting up[…]
Floating Bridges: Caution: Children Crossing
Subtitles for the hard-of-believing One of the strangest facts about film on DVD is that it is not — in the original sense of the word — cinema at all.[…]
UNDERWATER STORY
In the great generic title tradition of Woman In the Window, Girl On the Bridge and Female On the Beach comes M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady In the Water, though she’s[…]
A SCANNER DARKLY – Linklater Gets PKD Right
If almost any director or screenwriter other than Richard Linklater had been given the opportunity to make Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly into a movie, I think their immediate[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Leonard Cohen, Ungloomed
A group of rather spectacular performers – Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Anna McGarrigle, Martha Wainwright, Kate McGarrigle and Antony among them — gathered at the Sydney Opera House in 2005[…]
100 Years Old
Time to get this blog rolling. “Let loose the Kraken!” as Larry Olivier would say. (Clash of the Titans – 1981.) On June 18, 2006, a Father’s Day, Isabella Rossellini’s[…]
“Who Owns This Place?” Clashing Values in Sunset Blvd.
This is one close-up Louis B. Mayer wasn’t ready for There was a time when it seemed that Billy Wilder would live forever. Although he stopped directing films in 1981,[…]
Reunifying Identities: North and South in Contemporary South Korean Cinema
Can cinema do what politicians cannot? A 2003 article in the New York Times observed that movies in South Korea are contributing toward anti-American feelings among young people.((James Brooke, “When[…]
Hands Across the Atlantic: The 9th Annual European Union Film Festival
A Baltic-to-Balkan road trip No passports or visas were needed to check in at the 9th Annual European Union Film Festival, nor did one have to be an actual European[…]
Documentaries · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Speaking Out: Pioneering Doc Word Is Out Turns 29
Assimilate this Like any marginalized culture, queerdom carries on its own constant internal debate: to separate or assimilate? Separation means embracing the inner pervert, celebrating the diversity in the community[…]
David Lean’s Problem Child: Gorgeous but Flawed Ryan’s Daughter on DVD
For maximum effect, see it when you’re 13 The 1965 epic Doctor Zhivago was a Brobdingnagian success and the highest-grossing film at MGM since Gone with the Wind. Director David[…]
Epic Sweep: On Kurosawa’s Sprawling Red Beard
This one’s got it all, including the kitchen sink Kurosawa’s cinema is large in every sense of the word. He often spent a year or more on preparation, sometimes had[…]
Gene and Judy Go Wild! Thoughts on Minnelli’s The Pirate
The best of the Garland-Kelly collaborations? It seems a shame that Judy Garland and Gene Kelly were afforded only three opportunities to make a film together (musical buffs know that[…]
Directors · Music & Musicals · Producers & Studios · Reviews
The Hip Hooray and Bally Hoo: Busby Berkeley Explodes on DVD
Come and meet those dancing feet, and pianos, and buildings, and . . . Give the nearest Warner Home Video executive a big hug. The company has at last remastered[…]
Great Scott! Herzog Profiles God’s Angry Man
On the madness of Dr. Gene When I was a child and life was simple, one of my favorite forms of entertainment on the dawn of a dreary Sunday morning[…]
Walking the Fine Line: Between Clever and Stupid
“Is that all there was to the Man in Black?” From “The Man in Black,” 1971: Well, there’s a reason for the things that I have on. I wear the[…]
Drive S/He Said: Felicity Huffman in Duncan Tucker’s Transamerica
The odd couple takes it on the road You’ve got to give them credit — Oscar and Felix, I mean. They don’t rest on their laurels. They’re always out there,[…]
How Slick Is Too Slick? Jason Reitman’s Thank You for Smoking
A movie only a preppie could love A good preppie cares about three things: good Scotch, good pussy, and a good school for his son. Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) achieves[…]
The Misery and Splendors of Cinema: Godard’s Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma
“Godard 24 times per second” “I need a day to tell the history of a second, a year to tell the history of a minute, a lifetime to tell the[…]
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