Vincente Minnelli’s Descents Into Hell
Vincente Minnelli’s reputation is that of a stylist – someone who did not author his own screenplays, but who directed whatever the studio (usually MGM) assigned to him (usually musicals), and[…]
Marathon Season: Arrested Development 4
(this is a) breakthrough in the way media is delivered, solidifying the idea that the voice of the fans can revive just about anything, and introducing the full season ‘back-to-back’ marathon as the new ideal form of immersive simulacratic experience.
The Horrible Gatsby, the Bland Gatsby, and the Surprisingly Good Gatsby
After having seen the 1949 version of The Great Gatsby directed by Elliot Nugent and the 1974 version directed by Jack Clayton, I concluded that the novel was unfilmable. After[…]
Book review: The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, by Glenn Frankel
The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, by Glenn Frankel. New York: Bloomsbury, USA. 416pp. Hardcover. $28.00. The scene is a rough wooden fort on an East Texas homestead.[…]
Cinema du WTF – UPSTREAM COLOR (Shane Carruth 2013)
A singular and highly accomplished independent film, Upstream Color is philosophical science fiction in the tradition of the French nouvelle vague, seasoned with a dash of Cronenbergian body horror. Like[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries
From Climate Hacker to Hero: An Interview With Tim DeChristopher
Originally published in An environmental idealist stops an illegal oil and gas auction by bidding for parcels he can’t possibly afford. Savaged by an exponentially accelerating climate crisis, a once-proud[…]
Rarities, Ho! TCM Recommendations for May 17-31
Obscure Hollywood gems, from the depths of the TCM May 2013 schedule for your DVD-R-ing pleasure
A Gatsby Pre-View
My fiancée and I were sitting on the couch the other night. I was flipping channels on the TV and watching baseball on my laptop, she was poking around on[…]
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
A Boy and His Atom: The Smallest Movie Ever Made
IBM releases a movie starring actual atoms, on a screen you can’t even see with an ordinary microscope.
To the Wonder (Terrence Malick, 2013)
My four-word review of To the Wonder: “more of the same.” Which is not necessarily a bad thing … if you like Malick. To the Wonder continues the autobiographical mode of[…]
Directors · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
The Man Who Shot John Ford — in 3D: Spielberg Retrofits Jurassic Park with Mixed Results
“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[…]
Unreliable Narrative: Zero Dark Thirty, Torture, and Truth
“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
Zero Dark Thirty: Simple-Mindedness Dressed Up as Moral Complexity or Artistic Vagueness
“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.”
The Scandal of Vertigo: It’s Not What You Think
“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.”
“Drunk Literature”: On Malcolm Lowry, John Huston, and Under the Volcano
“Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.”
The Strangeness of Realism vs. the Realism of the Strange: Themes in Synecdoche, New York
“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.'”
The Strange Case of Basil Rathbone: The Life and Work of the Man Who Made Olivier — and Audiences — Swoon
“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
August and Everything After: A Half-Century of Surfing in Cinema
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
A Journey into Political Consciousness: Africa as “Setting and Backdrop” in Shekhar Kapur’s The Four Feathers (2002)
“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.”
Satirical Excess and Empty Vessels: Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy
“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.”
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