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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:
“The film’s main focus remains on the body as undesirable, non-ideal, open to external aggression and pollution. In typical Polanski fashion, the audience is trapped in an ‘uncomfortable visual space’ where the concept of a stable individual identity is never a matter of choice, but instead constituted by our surroundings and forces well beyond our grasp.”
Directors · Documentaries · New Media
“The whole effect is a Rand-esque, dream-like, dystopian feel. This is very much Curtis taking an auteur approach to his documentary — his creative personality is all over it and the effect is enthralling.” — from “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” review, The Telegraph, by Catherine Gee
“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.”
Essays · Genres · LGBT & Queer · Memoir
“Just by going to the movies I became, like the Final Girl, a target. A target, in my case, for bullies loitering outside the theater after the movie’s over. Having been beaten up under the marquee in sixth grade, I’d become reluctant to attend horror movies. But I had to go, despite the risk. I had to see — to see as the Final Girl sees.”
“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
“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.”
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
“Yet the film itself also hints at a way of being that exists outside of this paradigm, one that abandons the search for universal truth and instead prioritizes immediate phenomenological experience.”
“Kahaani captures this moment of rising disillusionment and change in the world. There is no ‘riding-into-the-sunset’ happy ending, for Vidya still remains an unhappy widow at the close of the movie: perhaps an appropriate resolution for these angsty times.”
“Life is a continuity which does not begin at birth; it is split up by birth.” — Nandor Fodor
Directors · Interviews · LGBT & Queer
“I’m just always interested in the ways in which we are not free agents, that our desires, our instincts, our anger, our determination, our survival instincts all butt against social constraints and social learning that are really deep. It’s not just a matter of changing your job or your lover.”
Why do lesbians have to be so boring?
Actors & Personalities · Reviews · Westerns
O to be torn, ‘twixt love and duty
“I didn’t come all the way down to Jamaica to become a slut.”— How Stella Got Her Groove Back
Then goodness knows what will happen
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · TV & Streaming
Read about what you can’t see
Festivals & Awards · Uncategorized
“Faust’s obsession is his lust for a pale girl who looks underage, referred to as a ‘little doll,’ the only pure thing in a foul society. The desire to corrupt that girl is his version of mastering the world.”
“Probably the only film that dwarfs the spectacle of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Chronicle also challenges that British hero’s often chilly pathology with its own surge of powerfully accruing life-and-death incidents in the survival struggles of farmer Ahmed.”
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
“We become faced with the individuality and humanity of history, the functioning components of a movement. 18 Days translates this reality of individual experience to film, in a sense presenting the audience with 10 YouTube clips of people affected by the revolution, telling their stories.”
Directors · Horror · Photo Essays
“The opening scenes of Freaks demonstrate a sophisticated use of staging, framing, editing, and camera movement to suture the audience into a complex set of sympathies. It is the work of a director in full control of the medium, able to use the camera to reveal a rich subtext beneath the dialogue.”
