Actors & Personalities · Reviews
All-American Medea: The Radical Pleasures of Beyond the Forest
“Today’s Rosa Moline would treat her lack of sophistication as a resource and her isolation as a launching pad.”
Category: Reviews
Sanshiro Sugata: Kurosawa’s Elegy for the Reluctant Kamikaze
“Sanshiro is ultimately after spiritual gain — to achieve the purity he found in the moonlit flower.”
Dreamtime – Inception vs. Secrets of a Soul (G.W. Pabst 1926)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df1CGxqS1MA] Nine out of ten bloggers agree – the dreams in Christopher Nolan’s INCEPTION are not particularly dream-like, at least, not much more so than the action sequences in your average[…]
The Godfather’s Godfather
Classic films come about through a lucky combination of accident and inspiration. In the case of THE GODFATHER, one of writer/director Francis Coppola’s most inspired choices was to model his film not on[…]
In(c)ept(ion)
To wrap up her gothic novels, Ann Radcliffe explained away her supernatural trappings at the conclusion. Imagine a story that explains away its action in every scene. Hitchcock was heavy-handed when[…]
Youth, Love, and Dogtooth
Dogtooth is an audaciously visceral statement that somehow avoids both flamboyance and gratuity, proving that on-screen shocks need not always be accompanied by a masturbatory aftertaste.
The Last Airbender: The Most (Incomplete) Fantastic Journey
Talk about wish fulfillment for kids – the Airbender mythos has it nailed. As a child dreams of gaining superpowers, he may wish for them all: i.e, the numerous abilities of[…]
Beyond the Forest
Beyond the Forest Dir. King Vidor, 1949 In America, the tagline read “Nobody’s As Good As Bette When She’s Bad.” In French they simply called it La Garce, ‘the bitch.’[…]
Jarmusch in a Title: Mystery Train from Criterion
I wonder about those who can watch Jarmusch any time. They must really love life’s randomness, how we must create order in what can be a pretty disordered universe. They[…]
Double Take
Double Take Dir. Johan Grimonprez The documentary Double Take is bookended by two of the scariest moments in American history: the launch of Sputnik and the release of The Birds.[…]
Jonah Hex-ing the Western
Call this a western exploitation film. Jonah Hex, based on a comic book series of the same name, has much more action than thought or sense. It borrows from the[…]
New Film from “Triplets” Director
Hand-drawn animation, once the mainstay of Disney and other studios that created “cartoons” for popular consumption, is becoming something of a lost art. Audiences seem to prefer Pixar-style CGI. Disney[…]
Metropolis: Restored, Reborn, and Rolling Out
In his nonfiction text On Writing, Stephen King describes the artist’s work as telepathy. Hardly the new-age type, King is referring to how thoughts can transmit though a quiet practice[…]
The Dark House
The Dark House (Dom ZÅ‚y) Dir. Wojcieh Smarzowski, Poland 2009 What the Inuit language is to snow, Polish is to varieties of squalor and mess. Take melina, an alcoholic’s den,[…]
Hitchcock meets Hitchcock in DOUBLE TAKE
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UIonNH-rz8] So this filmmaker, Johan Grimonprez, who teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, gets the idea of creating a fictional film about Alfred Hitchcock constructed largely[…]
Bluebeard: Breillat on Myth
There’s a strange defamiliarization going on in Catherine Breillat’s films. It could result from her frequent use of a stable camera, or what must be a controlled directing style. Through[…]
Tivo Alert: FACE BEHIND THE MASK (1941) 8 AM Monday Morning on TCM (5/24)
The pathos is never maudlin or icky, but rather soothing (thanks to Lorre’s velvety vocal delivery), creepy and a little post-modern – with Lorre’s own weird real life looks keeping him from ever ‘getting the girl’ no matter how many movies he’s in.
Two in the Wave: Fathers of a Revolution
If any movement made cinema history into a reactionary narrative, it would be the French New Wave. A batch of cinephiles, most working as critics for Cahiers du Cinema (established[…]
Frazetta and the Mothman
Another masterpiece by the late Frank Frazetta (1928-2010), and a classic example of how Hollywood studio thinking — a misguided attempt to reach the widest demographic possible — destroyed the potential[…]
Babies: A Nature Doc Starring Humans
From the outset, it seems to be a bold-faced cash-in culled from little investment. In Babies, a French-produced doc which got a surprisingly wide release this past weekend, we have[…]
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