Sex on the Beach: The Yin Yang of Female Sex Tourism in Two Films
“I didn’t come all the way down to Jamaica to become a slut.”— How Stella Got Her Groove Back
Gentlemen Prefer Bland Homogeneity: Unless They Have to Pitch in with the Others
Then goodness knows what will happen
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · TV & Streaming
Fred’s on TV! But You Can’t See Him, Except on YouTube
Read about what you can’t see
Festivals & Awards · Uncategorized
Experimental Faces: The Melbourne International Film Festival 2012
“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.”
Waving the Algerian Flag: The 50th Anniversary Algerian Sidebar at the 2012 Abu Dhabi Film Festival
“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
18 Days and the “Montage of History”: The People of the Egyptian Revolution
“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
“An Abomination on the Silver Sheet”: In Defence of Tod Browning’s Skill as a Director in the Sound Era (on Freaks)
“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.”
Cutters’ Way: The Mysterious Art of Film Editing
“The basic rules of film editing, first established in the silent era, still govern the industry today: maintain your eye lines, preserve continuity, respect planarity (the rules governing the transposition of three dimensions onto a two-dimensional plane), find a good rhythm, and, most important, always advance the story.”
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Das Weib des Pharao, Confidence, The Navigator, Casa de Lava
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
Nine Techniques for the Bad Viewer: A Manifesto
“Immerse yourself: you should never exist outside a movie.”
Noir · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
Technocratic Totalitarianism: One-Dimensional Thought in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville
“The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.” — Herbert Marcuse
Chump’s Ticket: BED OF ROSES (1933), SMART WOMAN (1931)
“Who’d of thunk there was a fake Mae West?”
Book review: A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ed. by Brigitte Peucker
A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Ed. Brigitte Peucker. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 656pp, £110/$199.95. When Fassbinder first burst onto the scene, his German contemporaries were horrified by his lifestyle, and[…]
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.”
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