Dispatches from Cannes 2011: #1: Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris
DATELINE CANNES, May 13, 2011: When watching Woody Allen movies in the past, I was always reminded of a remark John Updike makes of one of his characters: “He thought[…]
Mapping the Mind Between Movies: Intertextuality in the Work of Wong Kar-wai
“Frustrated by their unrequited love, their inability to capture their objet petit a, Wong’s characters search desperately for appropriate supplements onto which they can displace their yearnings and desires.”
Short Takes: Mise-en-Scène: Dorothy’s Pigtails, or Integrating Imperfection into Meaning
“George Lucas, engaged in an endless quest for perfect, seamless fantasy, hopes to erase any trace of the tricks necessary to build it. Oz instead understands that the evidence of artifice can itself bear meaning: in this case, that our wildest, most wish-fulfilling fantasies will still reflect our limitations.”
The Film Criticism of Alexis De Tocqueville: Or, When Heroes Yearn as Clouds Drift
“These characters, alone or twinned, slumber in the blanket of the Natural Cliché and sit and wait, just as we long for a tinge of disgust, hysteria, or irreverence to dismantle stoic facades inherited from some icy cinematic factory.”
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Who Took the Folk Out of Music? Everybody, It Seems
“How does Tibet’s cultural destruction differ, in essence, from Time-Warner’s choreographed glamorization of bitches and ho’s in inner-city America, or death metal’s hold over disenfranchised Midwestern youth?”
The Tomb of Thingness and Self-Doubt: Against the Cult of Infinity
“One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics. I am speaking of the infinite.” — Jorge Luis Borges
Crime · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica
Strangers with Candy: The Highway Safety Foundation and The Child Molester (1964)
“The issues surrounding The Child Molester have become only more ambiguous: despite its cheesy retro aesthetics, it allows no room for nostalgic reflection at how far attitudes have progressed or how much things have changed.”
Dream Girls: On Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica and Cathering Breillat’s Sleeping Beauty
“When you fall in love with someone who is asleep, are you attracted to her spirit, some ineffable essence in her being? Or are you skating on the edge between voyeurism and necrophilia?”
Sirk or Brecht? Or Both? Determining the Guiding Influence in Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant
“Is Fassbinder a Sirkian who, despite distancing techniques and irony, achieves audience identification and emotional catharsis? Or is he a hard-nosed Brechtian who distances us clinically from his characters so that we can calmly criticise their shortcomings?”
Between Heaven and Hell: The Movies — Martin Scorsese’s Middle Ground
“Together with his unobstructed panorama of those mean streets, and his long relationship with religion, Scorsese’s character was shaped. It infused in him just the right amount of guilt to develop stories about the struggle between good and evil and that dangerous place in between — not bad enough for hell, not good enough for heaven.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · War
Tarantino’s Transformations: Inglourious Basterds’ Dizzying Array of Sources
In which Tarantino reshapes Shakespeare, World War II movies, Leni Riefenstahl, Spaghetti Westerns, and more, under the deft guidance of that Italian master Ovid
Our Orgasms, Ourselves: Meditations on Movie Sex
“How can it be that the act that socially and historically has defined masculinity and to which, to a significant extent, male self-esteem is ultimately linked is not reliably rewarding to women?” —Rachel P. Maines
Actors & Personalities · Directors
Norman, Is That You? The Long Wait of Norman Foster
“Sadly, this oversight neglects Foster’s contributions to both film noir and world cinema, and it dismisses a life nearly as fascinating as that of Welles.”
Deborah Kerr: An Actress in Search of an Author
“The camera goes right through the skin. The camera brings out what you are, and in her case, there was always a kind of a humanity that she had in all of the things that she played . . . I think she made movies that have never worn off their splendor.” — Peter Viertel, Kerr’s husband
Interviews · Writers & Critics
Of Time and Place: An Interview with Writer Jon Raymond on Meek’s Cutoff and HBO’s Mildred Pierce
“In Meek’s Cutoff — about a community making decisions based on limited information, confronting their own attitudes toward the unknown — it seemed appropriate that the movie would end on a moment of unknowing, incompletion.”
Slash and Burn: Revisiting William Friedkin’s The Hunted (2003)
“Putting the pain back into violence is Friedkin’s real achievement in The Hunted, and indeed his unfashionable, irony-free approach helps explain why the film never found its audience in a decade where torture porn induced new depths of numbness in viewers.”
Helping Humanity: We All Get Stressed Out
But have you stopped behaving strangely?
More Damned and More Heroic: The Enigma of Michael Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather
“There’s something curiously remote and cool at the center of it, something slightly out of focus that makes this melodrama rather ambiguous and hard to assemble.”
Crime · Essays · Historical & Epic
A Propaganda Opportunity Shot Down: The Changing Image of the FBI Agent in G-Men (1935) and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951)
“Putting aside whatever doubts the FBI had about its image in these films, the two films represent one of the many fascinating permutations of the gangster film in the studio era, with the heroic FBI agent acting in a manner befitting an upstanding American, yet able to shift gears and punch out a gangster.”
Asian · Essays · Uncategorized
Notions of Gender in Hindi Cinema: The Passive Indian Woman in the Global Discourse of Consumption
“During the so-called ‘repressive’ ages sex was a joy, because it was practiced in secret and it made a mockery of all of the obligations and duties that the repressive power imposed. Instead, in tolerant societies, as the one we live in is declared to be, sex produces neuroses because the freedom granted is false and above all, it is granted from above and not won from below.” —Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pasolini prossimo nostro (2006) “Have you noticed how fashionable couples are today? But it is a completely false and insincere couple, frighteningly insincere. See these kids under the power of who knows what romantic notion, they walk hand-in-hand, or arm-in-arm, a young man and a girl. ‘What is this sudden romanticism?’, you may ask. Nothing. It is simply the new couple as revived by consumerism because this consumerist couple buys.” —Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pasolini prossimo nostro (2006)
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