“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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[…]
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,[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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.
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,[…]
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[…]
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[…]
“Putting the pain back into violence is Friedkin’s real achievement in The Hunted, and indeed his unfashionable, irony-free approach helps explain why the film never found its audience in a decade where torture porn induced new depths of numbness in viewers.”
“When you fall in love with someone who is asleep, are you attracted to her spirit, some ineffable essence in her being? Or are you skating on the edge between voyeurism and necrophilia?”
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“How does Tibet’s cultural destruction differ, in essence, from Time-Warner’s choreographed glamorization of bitches and ho’s in inner-city America, or death metal’s hold over disenfranchised Midwestern youth?”
The Strange Case of Angelica, dir. Manoel de Oliveira Sleeping Beauty, dir. Catherine Breillat On the face of it, the story of sleeping beauty should be a terrible subject for[…]
These kids are aping anime, creating a dead look about their pupils, removing all glimmer of intelligence from their face as if trying to pass as a zombie in a post-Romero school environment, where any glimmer of humanity is met with devouring and slobber.
Le Quattro Volte, dir. Michelangelo Frammartino Cold Weather, dir. Aaron Katz All of a sudden, reincarnation has become a major subject in contemporary film. In Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall[…]
We live in a weird age, full of metatextual interconnectivity, zeitgeist-riding, and death. Now that Liz Taylor’s gone, and her legacy and oeuvre suddenly unearthed down to the most[…]
…if someone is beating the shit out of you and you just sit there and take it–and it winds up on the internet–you’re a wimp. If you fight back, you’re a felon. Good work, adults!
Pre-Code · Reviews · TV & Streaming
TONIGHT at 8 PM on TCM! SAFE IN HELL (1931) a very lurid pre-code in the RAIN tradition, directed by unflinching two-fisted auteur William PUBLIC ENEMY/NIGHT NURSE Wellman. TCM’s Roger[…]
