Noir · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
Technocratic Totalitarianism: One-Dimensional Thought in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville
“The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.” — Herbert Marcuse
Category: Reviews
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
18 Days and the “Montage of History”: The People of the Egyptian Revolution
“We become faced with the individuality and humanity of history, the functioning components of a movement. 18 Days translates this reality of individual experience to film, in a sense presenting the audience with 10 YouTube clips of people affected by the revolution, telling their stories.”
Actors & Personalities · Reviews · Westerns
Carl Foreman’s and Fred Zinneman’s High Noon: Kelly versus Jurado! The Ultimate Face-Off!
O to be torn, ‘twixt love and duty
Straight arrow? Not Exactly. Jennifer Lawrence in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games
Why do lesbians have to be so boring?
Pushing Limits: On Crime, Bollywood, and Kahaani
“Kahaani captures this moment of rising disillusionment and change in the world. There is no ‘riding-into-the-sunset’ happy ending, for Vidya still remains an unhappy widow at the close of the movie: perhaps an appropriate resolution for these angsty times.”
Chump’s Ticket: BED OF ROSES (1933), SMART WOMAN (1931)
“Who’d of thunk there was a fake Mae West?”
The Essence of Television: The Irresistibility of Chauncey Gardner
“The beauty of Being There‘s satire lies in the strategy of depicting both television and its effects in a single man whose personality absorbs friend and foe, combines idiocy and[…]
Hollywood’s Recurring Dream: Myth and Fantasy in The Artist
“In the silent era, the film artifact always stands at greater or lesser remove from our sensory experience of the world, never in concordance. It is for this reason that Jean Epstein saw the coming of sound not as the fulfillment of the cinema but as its end point, drowning the fantastic world of the silent screen in what he called a ‘superabundant banality.'”
Reactionary Riffs: The Failures of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
“The final result of this pretentiousness is The Dark Knight Rises, a Batman film in name only, a joyless endeavor that ignores its heritage and puts on airs to conceal the half-baked politics and juvenile head games hiding behind its dark and scowling mask.”
“Film Blanc”: Shoveling Toward the Meaning of Fargo (1996)
“In Fargo, a milieu of livid pettiness and stunted lives, capitalist migraines, and psychotic rampages prevails beneath the veneer of cheesy, Norman Rockwellian Middle America.”
“Say Yes, Say Yes to Everything”: On Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes (1955)
“She is free to ‘move,’ but never escapes being trapped by whatever role she plays, whether in real life or in a performance that represents her life.”
Lost in Space: Stunning Special Effects Can’t Obscure the Flaws in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012)
“What is human?” Scott asks. “Make us care,” the audience replies.
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Nothin’ but Legs! Fred and Cyd Go out Kicking in Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings
Sorry, folks, but this is the last dance
Girl, Spinning: Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011)
“Sadly for Lou, Margot just isn’t a long-term kind of gal. The promise of what she could have is so much more tantalizing than what she has. Daniel represents a perpetual new day, seemingly existing only at dawn for much of the film.”
TCM Alert! Myrna Loy Ahoy! THE BARBARIAN (1933) and PENTHOUSE (1933)
If Zita Johan went off into the Gary Cooper Morocco desert with Valentino as a stud MUMMY and there was 50 SHADES OF GREY UN-PC whipping and dominance head games Stockholm Syndrome romance, well that gives you some of the plot. PRE-CODE RULEZ!
Films I Saw in Andrew Sarris’ Class
Sadly, we report the death of the influential writer, teacher, and film critic, Andrew Sarris (31 October 1928 — 20 June 2012). Sarris will be remembered for bringing the[…]
Podcast Pleasures
There are all kinds, types, brands, bits and pieces of chit-chatter to plug one’s ear into should one wish to plumb the misty myths and mysteries of movies and all[…]
Bridesmaids Revisited
Last summer, in the midst of the The Hangover 2‘s disappointingly massive success, another comedy came along, which went on to become something of a triumph of box office girlpower,[…]
Dispatch from Cannes 2012 #3: David Cronenberg’s COSMOPOLIS
Here we go again. Only a few days ago we had Walter Salles’ lumbering, rigidly faithful film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Now we have David Cronenberg’s equally[…]
Dispatch from Cannes 2012 #2: Walter Salles’s ON THE ROAD
Among the great might-have-beens of cinema are Greta Garbo as Dorian Gray, Ingmar Bergman directing Barbra Streisand in The Merry Widow, Orson Welles’s The Heart of Darkness, Sergei Eisenstein’s An[…]
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