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June 4, 2026
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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXII – gordsellar.com on:
The Esteemed Black Actresses Who Finally Have the Spotlight – The New York Times – Celebrity News on:
Directors · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
“As cold and insincere as it may be for Spielberg to flush an ‘updated’ version back into theaters as a marketing blitz for the forthcoming 3D sequel, Jurassic Park still[…]
“If Bigelow is not assembling the story, who is? The darkest implication of this is that Zero Dark Thirty takes no stand on the events of the last decade because the sources on which it relies believe that there is no stand to take. Her sources believe that the existence of war is a value-free fact; so this is what Bigelow believes.”
Activist & Political · Uncategorized · War
“Does it all come down to the injustice of 3,000 people dying on 9/11? But at some level everybody went through that. Yet few of us thereafter felt the need to cast off every other human part of ourselves in order to find ‘justice,’ whatever that means in such contexts.”
“I found it hard myself to believe that the home-video releases of one of the most highly regarded films ever made could be incomplete, but they are, and I still wouldn’t believe it if the evidence were not indisputable.”
“Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.”
“Charlie Kaufman’s film(script) can be understood as a commentary on a line from E. M. Cioran: ‘He who does not believe in the impossibility of truth, or does not rejoice in it, has only one road to salvation, which he will, however, never find.'”
“That God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success in — a great money success — it ruined me with its promise of an easy fortune. I didn’t want to do anything else, and by the time I woke up to the fact I’d become a slave to the damned thing and did try other plays, it was too late. They had identified me with that one part, and didn’t want me in anything else. They were right, too. I’d lost the great talent I once had through years of easy repetition, never learning a new part, never really working hard. Thirty-five to forty thousand dollars net profit a season like snapping your fingers! It was too great a temptation.” — James Tyrone, Long Day’s Journey into Night
Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore, Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair. — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Activist & Political · Essays · Historical & Epic
“In reflecting the postcolonial sensibilities, rather than the imperialist enthusiasms, of the early twenty-first century, the film is very much a creature of its time.”
“Rupert Pupkin is uniquely a product of late capitalism near the close of the twentieth century; his fantasies reflect mass media’s ability to twist the real world into an insubstantial collection of images that mimic reality — the representation of self becomes more than the actual self, and it becomes impossible to tell the difference.”
“We’ve long since lost faith in endings; the postmodern project of ‘decentering’ everything has made it irrelevant whether our endings end with conjugal bliss, a predicted death, nothingness, a tree, an empty gaze, or any assorted marginalia.”
“The wonder of life and the resources of imagination supply all the adventure you need.” — Roger Ebert (in his Great Movies review of My Neighbor Totoro)
“If, as [Nicola] Masciandaro claims, ‘cinema’s witness’ is ‘somewhere between the pure loss of head (negatively being no one) and the playful transcendence of the capital (positively being neither oneself nor someone else),’ then this witness’s penumbral status becomes not only ontologically problematic, but morally problematic into the bargain.”
“Kahan’s site encroaches on the nascent landscape of a new mode of archival behavior, increasingly obligatory in and enabled by the digital age, in which archival collections move out of the physical tyranny of closed vaults, reconceived as virtual and dynamic, to empower a wider audience of users through hypermodern modes of informed and active engagement.”
“Moorehead cannot pause to celebrate performances of Adele and the fabulous Shirley Bassey because they contradict her depiction of the Oscars as an unabated mudslide of anti-woman vulgarity; she does not discuss the implications of Michelle Obama’s appearance, either. Why?”
“Don’t we most of all resent the person who helps?” — Victor Quinn
“The unrolling of the canvas was timed to take around two hours, with the speed of movement simulating the experience of drifting on a steamboat down the river itself. Lit by gaslight, the presentation was accompanied by the delivery of a lecture by a narrator, an episodic commentary that ranged from the didactic to the purely entertaining. The exhibition was often joined by piano accompaniment, the score composed specifically for the painting and even made available for purchase after viewing. In some cases, as the scene moved, stage crews would manipulate lighting to simulate sunrises and sunsets, daylight and darkness.”
But, dearest sister, never ever swoon.
“As Cyril’s frenetic movement appears to up the tempo of the film, the directors drastically slow down the pace by using long takes, and as little cutting as possible. It is amid the two contrasting tendencies that Cyril’s story finds the perfect narrative balance.”
“As cold and insincere as it may be for Spielberg to flush an ‘updated’ version back into theaters as a marketing blitz for the forthcoming 3D sequel, Jurassic Park still exemplifies, for better and worse, the staying power and effectiveness of Spielbergian theme park ride filmmaking, independent of the fact that it is actually about a theme park, and its success is a testament to how skilled he can be at showing an audience what it wants to see.”
