Through a Glass Darkly: On Béla Tarr’s Damnation
“You’re standing alone at the entrance to the tunnel to an enchanting world, because you know something I can’t even put a name to. Something deeper and more ruthless than even I can understand.”
Asian · Historical & Epic · War
History or Humanity? On Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death: A Nietzschean Perspective on Nanjing
“The monumental approach, as one would guess, takes history as something to be inspired by, as a record of human greatness that serves to encourage similar greatness by individuals in future times; in the case of City of Life and Death, it is the various acts of compassion and solidarity that play this role.”
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Four Polish Cinema Classics: Innocent Sorcerers, Goodbye, See You Tomorrow, Eroica, Night Train, A Trip to the Moon, The Spiders
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
La Bete Humaine: Runaway Train
“The train is a symbol for whatever you want it to be,” the film’s director, Andrei Konchalovsky, explains. “It can be viewed as a prison because they can’t get out of it, or considered as freedom because they escaped from prison on it, or considered as our civilization running out of control because no-one can stop it.”
Two Cinematic Visions of the Inca Conquest: The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Aguirre: Wrath of God
“Both films suggest Europe has run aground spiritually, as they both depict the Catholic Church and its representatives to be as bloodthirsty as the conquistadors.”
Autogyros and Zeppelins: How Cinematic They Fly
Who wouldn’t love to go to L.A. from NYC via zeppelin? So what if it takes a week? Open air rear observation compartments! Farmers looking up, amazed, waving, scratching their heads in disbelief… rivers, lakes, Montana…
Fun and Hunger Games. And Other Reality Shows.
For a science fiction film francise to become truly successful, it helps not to be too original. The most successful of these franchises are based on ideas that have been floating[…]
VistaVision Makes Sense now: TO CATCH A THIEF (1955) on Blu-Ray
istaVision, it’s also what Hitch shot VERTIGO on… and now both those films too make more sense, VERTIGO especially always seemed too traveloguey for a supposed top ten of all time classic. Now, if it was on Blu-Ray I’d get it even though the DVD version I have is pretty damned good and I don’t even really love it… yet
Horror · Reviews · TV & Streaming
FridayLight NetfixStreamFest: The Corman-Price Poe Cycle
Price’s florid hamminess fills in the sparse patches of Corman’s sometimes spare mise en scene, and the sparseness conversely gives Price lots of room to floridly ham. Add Les Baxter’s crazy scores, some good freaky psychedelic California painters to make the portraits of dead and evil
uncles and incestuous sisters and flowing red paint credits, and sharp scripts by Richard Matheson and pre-CHINATOWN Robert Towne, and viola!
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews · TV & Streaming
Sex, Drugs and Germans: 6 Hidden Gems of Netflix Streaming
Homicidal gang debs, tripping youth, murderous charismatic hippie cult leaders,German lesbian junkie spies, sexy German terrorists: 6 Rare, Strange, awesome films (all on Netflix Streaming) from or about the late 60s-early 70s.
Activist & Political · African American · Reviews
Scatological Cinema, or Why The Help Stinks
Only white Hollywood would make a mainstream movie where toilets and shit are used as significant tropes to tell a story of black-white relations, as if the topic is right up black folks’ alley.
The Connectitrons Are Coming! But wait a minute, weren’t they here all along?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single species in want of heart, brains, and courage stands in need of the Connectitrons — or, at least, the good version[…]
Blue Movie: Rediscovering the Spark in Shinya Tsukamoto’s A Snake of June
“An incessant downpour dominates every exterior scene, and even some interior ones through sound. Water becomes a central motif, from Rinko relaxing contemplatively in the bath to Shigehiko watching people drown in the tank.”
“Dad, Is That You?” Revisiting M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense
“Fatherhood, in a sense of a conscious begetting, is unknown to man.” — James Joyce, Ulysses
The Annihilative Evils of the Polka Tremblante: Fragments on Rhetoric, Naiveté, and Inevitable Helixes
“Leontev’s rhetoric, though overblown, might strike a chord in those who lament the replacement of honest, inspired amateurism with the interchangeable bodies of the trousered professional class. But wait . . . the polka tremblante?”
The Bird Identity: Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol
“Some of the most refreshing aspects of Ghost Protocol are the ways in which it defies so many of the accepted conventions of modern action movies, most of which can probably be attributed to Bird’s economic and meticulous mise en scène.”
From the Sublime to the Romantic: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia
“To call any work of von Trier’s life affirming, especially one that ends in, of all things, the apocalypse, must seem seriously misguided. Life affirmation in von Trier? The most notoriously nihilistic director of his generation? But surprising as it sounds, a close reading of the film reveals that this reevaluation is just what he is after.”
Turn, Turn, Turn: The Seasons of Korean Cinema
“If the technical advancement of cinema now means that nature has been conquered, and most movies take place in a meteorological nowheresville created in a digital effects lab (where the weather is either hyper-real or airlessly unpresent), it strikes me as significant that the weather, the presence of the seasons, persists so strongly in Korean cinema, even as it has grown to rival Hollywood in sophistication, ambition, and technical achievement.”
Cinema Is Magic (also, Clocks and Trains): On Martin Scorsese’s Hugo
“‘If you ever wonder where your dreams come from, look around: this is where they’re made.’ Maybe the value of Scorsese’s film lies exactly in this sentence and the context in which it is delivered.”
Burning Down the House: The 52nd Thessaloniki International Film Festival (2011)
“It is within this vortex of social and political upheaval that Greek filmmakers have found some traction, creating sharp, insightful works that raise awareness while revealing unflattering truths about Greek society and the current ‘crisis.'”
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