Racing with Bruce Dern: A Memoir
“The first time I saw him – in his grungy sweats, slouching around the dim, indoor, eleven-laps-to-the mile track – he already had the snarky, shambling look that would become[…]
Hanging in a Classroom Some Day: Woody Allen, Artistic Legacy, and the Blu-ray Editions of Annie Hall and Manhattan
Annie Hall is warm, taut rather than loose, angular instead of fuzzy, Manhattan is a love letter to New York, a hymn to neurosis, and a delicate straddling of the[…]
Marcel Ophuls and the Great Big Blank: Montreal International Documentary Festival 2013 (Nov. 12-23, 2013)
“With Ophuls too we need to be on our guard, given the idiosyncratic way he shapes material. There is often a tricky leakage of voice-over between successive scenes: at one[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
Doing the American Hustle
“People believe what they want to believe because the guy who made this was so good that it’s real to everybody. Now who’s the master, the painter or the forger?”[…]
Blocked or Taking Stock? A Very Brief, Not Too Bleak Mid-Winter View (Albeit with the Aid of Spectacles)
“I now present Anthony Quinn (1915-2001) – the mighty one himself – in a light few will recognize: not Quinn the rank sentimentalist ham (or Eskimo), but Quinn the deeply[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
The Man Who Had Everything: The Curious Case of Jack Pickford and the New York Times
INTRODUCTION Jack Pickford – actor, director, and alleged womaniser, alcoholic, drug-user, bootlegger and all-around scoundrel. Born in 1896, Jack was the brother of Mary Pickford, the Queen of Hollywood during[…]
Blank Like a Panther: Cat People (1982) blu-ray review
“Even if Schrader would like to completely eliminate any ‘magic’ or dream-into-reality bleeding, it’s still there – the boundaries of his material threaten to swamp him at every turn, so kudos to him for at least not running in fear back behind the phallic bars of patriarchal condescension that was such an annoyance in the original. “
The Fall of the House of Warner: The Warner Brothers
“In the 1930s, Warners effectively became the studio to go to for social critique, a risky position to hold under the Hays Code when pictures could be censored not just[…]
Activist & Political · SF & Fantasy
Battleground Pandora: The War over James Cameron’s Avatar*
Avatar metaphorically attacks all martial, colonial, and expansionist histories, which have occurred at the expense of the world’s indigenous peoples and Earth’s biocomplexity. Both implicitly, through the film’s narrative, and[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grande Bouffe’s Deadly Physiological Pleasures
“To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla” ~ Marco Ferreri Francis Bacon once said: “We’re flesh, potential carcasses. If[…]
The Wolf of Wall Street: Who Are We to Judge?
In Jarhead, his memoir of the first Iraq War, Tony Swofford calls our attention to a paradox of “antiwar” films. When he and his fellow Marines hear they’re about to[…]
French Fusions: Cinemania Festival, Montréal, 2013
“No-one can get over the paradox of a sphinx head on top of a chic model’s body: the sense of this slight figure propping up a magnificent mask.” Cinemania has[…]
Experimental & Underground · TV & Streaming
That Uncanny Moment: Jack Cole’s Design of the Kolchak: The Night Stalker Title Sequence
Based on a pair of TV movie adaptations by Richard Matheson, the Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974) series ran only 20 episodes, surprising given the popular and commercial success of[…]
Where Do We Go from Here? The 54th Thessaloniki Film Festival (Nov. 1-10, 2013)
Cinema has a way of capturing the unease of life, those wearying sharp fragments and provocations of everyday experience that reveal a greater truth. At the 54th Thessaloniki International Film[…]
Blue Is the Warmest Color 1: Unresolved Alienations of Class
“Pornographic,” “voyeuristic,” “clinical” . . . at a time when gay cinema is known for its matter-of-fact, graphic handling of sex, it’s surprising that the sex scenes in Abdellatif Kechiche’s[…]
Favorite Films of 2013
“Rather than some good safe white elephant of a film or a smutty feel-bad historical repressionist masterpiece, these are films that have escaped the maze of cliché with moxy, wit, and nutz.”
Post-Sensory Pong: A Future-Shock Analysis of Virginia Postrel’s “Who Needs Raise When you have TV?”
Now anyone who can scrape together a few hundred dollars can load up on enough movie streams and DV-R and giant LCD screens to never leave the house, so who needs a nice house?
Future-Pissed: THE VISITOR (1979), AKIRA (1988), TANK GIRL (1995)
Though last December’s lack of promised Mayan doomsday never panned out, December 2013 is laden with new DVDs and theatrical revivals that allow us to pretend the world ended as far back as 1979. Oh if only… we might all be rolling with Humongous by now, or Bane, or what’s the difference?
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Reviews
Clint, Caught in the Act: On The Beguiled, and Don Siegel’s Leading Man
“While the premise of an injured soldier recuperating in a house full of smitten women seems ripe for male-fantasy debasement, the film is deeply interested in the psyches of its[…]
Beyond Borders: Talking with Filmmaker Eyas Salman
“Salman says he identifies as a Palestinian, but does not feel a sense of nationalism. His is not the generation that still holds onto house keys and deeds to property[…]
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