“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.'”
The Next Top Model: Cinema’s Rules of Dressing
“Black hair is set off by bright colour, and these women often resembled blocks of pure pigment. They look ravishing but only half-alive . . . even the tough-talking Gardner looks like an image painted onto the screen.”
Actors & Personalities · Experimental & Underground
In a Garden of Tin Men: Marion Eaton (1932–2011) Remembered
“Marion’s character in Thundercrack!, the daft and delusional farm widow Gert Hammond, harkened back to a much more handcrafted Tennessee Williamsesque archetype. She infuses Gert with real pathos as well as genuine creepiness in a series of hauntingly photographed monologues that transcend the film’s threadbare conceits.”
Counterculture · Essays · Writers & Critics
On the Road to the Ninth Circle of Hell: Easy Rider Merges Lanes with Dante’s Inferno and Faust
How Easy Rider laid the groundwork for Wild Hogs
Grounded in the World after Eden: On Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive
The horror lingers and seeps; the feelings are sponged away.” — Anthony Lane, “Road Kill” The New Yorker September 26, 2011
Actors & Personalities · Asian
A Mere Mortal After All: On the Death of Dev Anand
“Endless self-parody is not a ‘new idea’ — and unless conducted with the awareness of the irony inherent in the process, it is a prank a person may play for years before realizing the joke is on him.”
Activist & Political · Crime · Essays
“What Are Kingdoms but Gangs of Criminals?” The Politics of The Departed
“I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” – Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) in The Departed
The Future of a Delusion: On David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (2011)
“Cronenberg’s method, it seems, is perfectly suited for making truly historical dramas, stripping away our tendency to read individuals through their writings in something like the way diseases in his films strip his characters down to their essences.”
Actors & Personalities · Experimental & Underground
Robert Cowan (1930-2011): Unsung Superstar of the Underground
“Bob and the new people he introduced us to were very inspiring because it meant to me, by seeing them, that you can get older and still run around in a world of uncharted horizons.” – George Kuchar
Activist & Political · Reviews
The Plague 2.0: On Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion
“The original industrial accidents as, for instance, the derailment of a train or the crash of an airplane, were all specific, localized, and particular accidents. They were taking place at a certain place and at a certain moment in time. Now, however, the revolution of instantaneous transmissions brought about by telecommunications makes the accident global.” — Paul Virilio
Mind over Mother: Ecstasy and Cruelty in Brian De Palma’s Carrie
“One reason for [Carrie’s] success in both print and film, I think, lies in this: Carrie’s revenge is something that any student who ever had his gym shorts pulled down in Phys Ed or his glasses thumb-rubbed in study hall could approve of. In Carrie’s destruction of the gym . . . we see a dream revolution of the socially downtrodden.”2
Carnivals of Our Fathers:” Media Movies” Before the Television Age
“That what we now call ‘the media’ could be a threat to society was not necessarily an unknown topic before television. From the 1930s, movies had recognized the manipulative side of the press.”
There’s a Holdup in the Bronx, Brooklyn’s Broken out in Fights — but Who Gives a Damn? Joe E. Ross and Fred Gwynne, not as funny as I remembered them in Nat Hiken’s Car 54, Where Are You?
You can go home again; it’s just not a lot of fun when you get there
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Birth of a Nation, Way Down East, Medea, Bellflower, Touch of Evil
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
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