Genet Meets Fassbinder: Sexual Disorientation(s) in Querelle
“Why is Fassbinder allowed this aesthetic duplicity in the melodramas but not in Querelle?” When the titular hero of Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest allows himself to be fucked for the[…]
Taking the Word of a Talking Alligator: The Garbage Pail Kids Movie Reconsidered
Deleuze, Marcuse, Bahktin, Dodger, Juice, Valerie Vomit . . . Only a few years ago, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain was accepted as the most influential work in 20th-century art, by a[…]
Taking a Break in Hollywood: The Dreamers of Holiday and The Razor’s Edge
“In films these days, people are hardly ever ‘taken’ by others — they don’t strike up sudden affinities, or become voluptuously intrigued by enemies.” In the 1940s, it was quite[…]
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows
“Whether alone or with others, you live with yourself.” Like Jean-Pierre Melville, Albert Camus was a young man active in the French Resistance, during which he wrote editorials for the[…]
Market Forces: Desperation in Caché, The Child, Paradise Now, and 13 Tzameti
Location, location, location First-world living promotes a comforting fairy-tale that if we all work hard, very hard, the rewards of the market can be ours. But even the most upbeat[…]
In Love with Liv Who Loves Life: Surviving Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf
“If the demons leave, maybe the angels will too” All happy artists — to subvert Tolstoy’s dictum about families — are different, each in their own way, but all unhappy[…]
Crack Christ: The Excess and the Ecstasy of Bad Lieutenant
“Lord, my Lord! How true it is that whoever work for you is paid in troubles.” ~ St. Teresa of Avila Junkies and saints know about giving. After shooting up[…]
Floating Bridges: Caution: Children Crossing
Subtitles for the hard-of-believing One of the strangest facts about film on DVD is that it is not — in the original sense of the word — cinema at all.[…]
The Ballad of Smith & Siegel:First Stanza
There’s always something very dubious about public feuds; spitting contests luminaries get into that play themselves out in a mass media culture hooked on diversion. No matter how vituperative and[…]
UNDERWATER STORY
In the great generic title tradition of Woman In the Window, Girl On the Bridge and Female On the Beach comes M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady In the Water, though she’s[…]
A SCANNER DARKLY II – The Kaufman Version
In 1997, Charlie Kaufman wrote a screenplay adaptation of A Scanner Darkly that was never produced. You can read it here. Surprisingly, Kaufman’s version follows Philip K. Dick’s novel as[…]
A SCANNER DARKLY – Linklater Gets PKD Right
If almost any director or screenwriter other than Richard Linklater had been given the opportunity to make Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly into a movie, I think their immediate[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Leonard Cohen, Ungloomed
A group of rather spectacular performers – Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, Anna McGarrigle, Martha Wainwright, Kate McGarrigle and Antony among them — gathered at the Sydney Opera House in 2005[…]
The Lewton-Friedkin-Kubrick Connection
I saw William Friedkin’s Cruising for the first time in 25 years when it played on IFC recently. Having listened to Friedkin’s DVD audio commentary on Val Lewton’s The Leopard[…]
BRICKBATS TO LOS ANGELES TIMES
Last month, the Los Angeles Times Magazine published a cover story concerning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. The story was written by L.A. Times Book Editor, David L. Ulin, and in it,[…]
100 Years Old
Time to get this blog rolling. “Let loose the Kraken!” as Larry Olivier would say. (Clash of the Titans – 1981.) On June 18, 2006, a Father’s Day, Isabella Rossellini’s[…]
“Who Owns This Place?” Clashing Values in Sunset Blvd.
This is one close-up Louis B. Mayer wasn’t ready for There was a time when it seemed that Billy Wilder would live forever. Although he stopped directing films in 1981,[…]
Reunifying Identities: North and South in Contemporary South Korean Cinema
Can cinema do what politicians cannot? A 2003 article in the New York Times observed that movies in South Korea are contributing toward anti-American feelings among young people.((James Brooke, “When[…]
Hands Across the Atlantic: The 9th Annual European Union Film Festival
A Baltic-to-Balkan road trip No passports or visas were needed to check in at the 9th Annual European Union Film Festival, nor did one have to be an actual European[…]
Notes on Naruse: An Auteur Ascends
Pitch-black pessimism, unsparing emotional truths, and women on the verge In the eighties, an impressive full-scale retrospective of Mikio Naruse’s films traveled the world and his reputation in the West[…]
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