The Horror of Origins: In Ron Honthaner’s The House on Skull Mountain
“This emergent form — the death’s head — is not a part of the scene, but rather a reflection upon it, potentially a visualization of the character’s thoughts — evoked[…]
Category: Reviews
Children of Violence: Studies show PG-13 more violent than R
“Studies like this misunderstand the basic use of cinematic myth (which includes action films) as a ceremonial exercise in psychic catharsis, meant to appease the angry darkness of the masculine unconscious.
La Notte (1961) on Criterion Blu-ray (review), scattered like coffin lid coasters on a golf course coffee table
“a La Notte blu-ray. And now it all makes sense, the rust is a poem, the vast stretches of party space and elaborate mirror reflections are so haunting and perfectly evoked you can smell the cigarette smoke, the grass, the chlorine, and cologne, all fusing into one empty gaze of a breeze. “
Activist & Political · Reviews
Blue Jasmine and the Great Recession: Paean for Our National Nightmares
“Allen delineates the gaudy days of the subprime years and the divided nation in its aftermath — one divided by misfortune, political and economic abuses and a sense of cultural and social malaise. With a central character who complements both aisles of the economic divide with her 1% past and Generation Y career struggles and a narrative that captures a virulent political right from the financial elites of Wall Street to the angry blue collar workers of San Francisco, Allen’s film is a bitter complement to our post Lehman-Brothers era.”
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
The Church of Holy Motors: A Transformation in Metafilm
“What is fantasy when scripted shows that dominate popular culture are labeled ‘reality’ and social media allows everyone to be their own celebrity and put on their own performance of their best self?”
Activist & Political · Reviews
David Ayer’s End of Watch (2012) and the Militarization of U.S. Law Enforcement
“End of Watch incorporates the visual and narrative codes of Iraq War films, inviting the viewer to draw a comparison between the battlegrounds of the “war on terror” and the mean streets of Los Angeles.”
Asian · Reviews · Uncategorized
Poetry as Motion: Taking a Closer Look at Wong Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster
“Now the fight becomes something more than a contest of wills, it becomes a careful discovery of kindred spirits as seen through a reciprocal poetry of martial arts form.”
Buried Alive in Space: The Non-Story of Gravity
“As the camera constantly spins with the characters, as one might get motion sickness, we may realize that the film really is about nothing. And it does not matter.”
Existential Lethargy: Hong Sang-soo’s Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (2013)
“Jung Eun-chae is a graceful, beautiful Haewon, but her daydreams seem facile, and the backpack she wears for most of the movie — which seems to be empty — tempers this statuesque gracefulness, rendering Haewon an awkward sightseer or a precocious child on a first-time school trip.”
Enfeebling Fables: Weak Allegory in Les Carabiniers and The Silence
“If Godard reveals what Benjamin calls ‘the beauty’ of recognizing that twentieth-century art has to become more than a parable, Bergman offers a vision of ‘the misery’: the desperate, impossible effort to find some kind of truth in a text that offers only transmissibility.”
TCM Freak Rarity Schedule – Aug. 22- Sept. 4 2013
Set thy Tivo for: Rare Hawks, Orange-blazoned Shakes, Gish vs. Men, Glenda the kickass Reporter, Carpenter classics, and uncomfortable laughter…
When the Zombie Looks: The Human Being Undone in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead
” Like the titular beasts in Hitchcock’s The Birds, the zombies invade the home, the city, the culture, but even more importantly in Night, they invade the self, like a disease, an infection that takes root in us and undoes us from the inside out. In this, the story of the zombie is a story of colonization — reverse colonization to be exact, a story where the Other finally has its day.”
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence: Oshima’s Pacific Theater
“Although he pays lip service to the honor code of Bushido, Yonoiʼs facade of the disciplined warrior is transparent. Celliers sees through it. As Yonoi is about to execute Hicksley, Celliers challenges him in the most provocative way, with a defiant kiss.”
Telling Stories: Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012)
“Part of it is about the right to privacy, and part of it is about telling the story the way she wanted it to be told. But there’s also an underlying argument regarding the existential fact of being an actor, and the related argument of identity being performed rather than essential.”
Directors · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Tarantino and Spielberg: Two Visions of America
“In Lincoln, the abolition of slavery is the goal of the narrative; the closing scenes are intended to confirm our notion of a historical trajectory that moves from injustice to justice. In Django Unchained, the narrative is simpler, but the notions of justice and history are more complex. The story gives no hint that slavery will ever be abolished. It presents an America that has yet to escape its foundational sin, and may never be able to.”
“Baby, I Do Care”: The Generic Disorders of Angel Face
“This noir heroine comes very close to having it all: the house, the money, and the freedom. Kitty Collins, Kathie Moffatt, and the rest of the femme fatales would have been exultant. They’d have tried to knock some sense into Diane, told her not to mope about and enjoy the jackpot. But she is something of an angel. She repents.”
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Tabu; French Masterworks: Russian Émigrés in Paris, 1923-1928
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
A Fragment of Seeking: Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide
“When Ellen Sands, the land girl who vies for his affections, sees Johnny off, the implication is that she’ll be a soft place for him to land when he comes down from his guilty obsession over Mora; her offer of coffee on his way out is as Ariadne’s gift to Theseus of the thread of consciousness that would lead him out of the minotaur maze.”
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Getting into Curtis Harrington’s Head: Flicker Alley and Drag City Release the Avant-Mainstream Director’s Experimental Shorts
“Being fascinated with the occult, Harrington would surely have recognized that by beginning and ending his life work with the same story he was drawing a mandala around that life, making it as self-contained a thing as one of his films, all of which belong to the “trance” tradition whose introspective mien establish the work as occurring within a given consciousness walled off in some way from the natural world.”
Habitat for Inhumanity: On Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium
“Yes, there are things that disappoint about Elysium. But there is also much to relish about Blomkamp’s still-developing wit and vision, especially his parodic assumptions about future dominant languages and ethnicities.”
Links + BSA
