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.”
Category: Reviews
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.”
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.”
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[…]
Slash and Burn: Revisiting William Friedkin’s The Hunted (2003)
“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.”
Dream Girls: On Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica and Cathering Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty
“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
Who Took the Folk Out of Music? Everybody, It Seems
“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?”
Sleeping Beauties
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[…]
Her Eyes Were Wide and Glazed: The Uncanny Valley part 2
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.
Four Seasons
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[…]
Now’s the time for BOOM!
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[…]
Now More than Ever: MY BODYGUARD (1980)
…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
March Must-Sees: SAFE IN HELL tonight on TCM, Plus TRISTANA at BAM and a missing link
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[…]
Links + BSA
