The Essence of Television: The Irresistibility of Chauncey Gardner
“The beauty of Being There‘s satire lies in the strategy of depicting both television and its effects in a single man whose personality absorbs friend and foe, combines idiocy and[…]
“Every Man and Woman Is an Island”: Modern Discontent in the Films of Wong Kar-wai
“Wong shows that certain modernized countries have been able to flourish economically because they have embraced globalization, but with powerful emotional consequences for their people.”
Girl, Spinning: Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011)
“Sadly for Lou, Margot just isn’t a long-term kind of gal. The promise of what she could have is so much more tantalizing than what she has. Daniel represents a perpetual new day, seemingly existing only at dawn for much of the film.”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Nothin’ but Legs! Fred and Cyd Go out Kicking in Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings
Sorry, folks, but this is the last dance
Lost in Space: Stunning Special Effects Can’t Obscure the Flaws in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012)
“What is human?” Scott asks. “Make us care,” the audience replies.
Death of a President: The Last Temptation of Anti-Bush Critics
“Where many people watch a film for a true or faithful rendition of an historical event, I needed confirmation that the thing I was viewing was . . . made up!”
(Re)Staging the Story: The Pre-History of Cinema
“Though most people in earlier times could not even have imagined the present role of science and technology, nor, even more implausibly, the apparently alternate life offered by the cinema and its recent offshoots, the human imagination refused to be tied down.”
New Fathers, Old Conflicts? Patriarchal Politics in 3:10 to Yuma, Don’t Come Knocking, and Atmen
“Is emotional capacity, as figured by film, an entity of fixed dimension, so that if men are represented as more caring, women must be represented as caring less?”
Activist & Political · Festivals & Awards
Growing Pains: The 2012 Moscow and Odessa International Film Festivals
“Peter Greenaway’s theses on the death of cinema perhaps inspired the greatest discussion at the Odessa festival: his insistent repetition that cinema was dead but that the screen is very much alive was received as an interesting provocation but didn’t convince many.”
Meet the Macbeths: Again and Again and Again
Almost as though we’re addicted or something
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Essays
Love of Sophia: Lost in Translation, Transcendence, Transfiguration
“Translation is at best an echo.” – George Borrow
Leslie Stevens’ Private Property (1960): Noir’s Edge of Wetness
Long thought lost, Stevens’ grim exposé of gender roles and sexual psychopathy may be the missing link in noir’s transition to the sixties.
“Say Yes, Say Yes to Everything”: On Max Ophuls’ Lola Montes (1955)
“She is free to ‘move,’ but never escapes being trapped by whatever role she plays, whether in real life or in a performance that represents her life.”
The Visual “Finding,” the Linguistic “How,” and the Interrogative “Talk”: Three Examples of Early 21st-Century Rhetoric
“Soon enough, America’s purported indie filmmakers will regale us with a ‘Remonstrating Cody,’ a ‘Defibrillating Schnitzler,’ a ‘Rehumidifying Allison,’ or a ‘Macerating Tennyson.’ Long live the present participle!”
Indeterminate Position: Kechiche, Tragicomedy, and La Graine et le Mulet
“If Kechiche treats political tragedy, then, it is first by creating abundantly detailed, richly convincing comédie humaine, and nowhere is this more apparent than in what is justly considered his major achievement, La Graine et le Mulet.”
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Genres
Random Acts of Sensible Violence: Genre, Hong Kong Censorship, and the Brief Ascent of “Category III”
A New Solution to Herbert Marcuse’s Old Riddle
Interviews · Writers & Critics
Political Filmmaking and America’s “Poisoned Chalice”: The Banned Gore Vidal Interview
“He fears the ‘Party of God’ because he reads their ‘cultural elite’ and ‘family values’ rhetoric as ‘code for [attacking] the media, the Jews, the homosexuals, the adulterers, people who do not believe in God, people who are better looking than you are — put it all together, you have a poisoned chalice.'”
Nothing Is Moving: Resnais and Slow Cinema at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Czech Republic, 2012
“Finally, the actors sit before a screen which plays a minimalist version of Eurydice: what will be on the other side of this already unreal scenario?” (on Resnais’ You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet)
Experimental & Underground · Festivals & Awards
All Shook Up: Australian International Experimental Film Festival 2012
“Despite this titillated vision, we experience a slight distance as a result of the period fashions and bodies — the women appear relatively natural and unsculpted by today’s standards.”
“Film Blanc”: Shoveling Toward the Meaning of Fargo (1996)
“In Fargo, a milieu of livid pettiness and stunted lives, capitalist migraines, and psychotic rampages prevails beneath the veneer of cheesy, Norman Rockwellian Middle America.”
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