Documentaries · Essays · Reviews
“To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past — which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day.” – from “On the Concept of History” by Walter Benjamin
“If you can get past all these potentially off-putting deviations, Park Row offers Samuel Fuller at his most free, exuberant, and even experimental. As unfocused as the narrative is, it is essentially a realist fable, or collection of fables, condensing an entire rough-and-tumble era into a coincidence-riddled pill.”
“From now on we’ll do everything together. Just one big, happy family — father [helps up Mallare], daughter [puts his arm around Anna], and son-of-a-bitch [points to himself].” — from the film
“A purely political reading of Southern Comfort does not account for the fact that Hill is as much a visual stylist as he is a storyteller. Or rather, it does not account for the manner in which he tells his stories through his style, which happens to be more finely attuned to the spare poetics of male action cinema than any other American filmmaker of his generation.”
Noir · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
“The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.” — Herbert Marcuse
“Who’d of thunk there was a fake Mae West?”
“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[…]
“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.'”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What is human?” Scott asks. “Make us care,” the audience replies.
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Sorry, folks, but this is the last dance
“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.”
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!
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[…]
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[…]
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,[…]
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[…]
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[…]
