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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXII – gordsellar.com on:
The Esteemed Black Actresses Who Finally Have the Spotlight – The New York Times – Celebrity News on:
“Britt looks like the top as he bends Kato over and as he barks orders at his employee, but as every physical confrontation in the film demonstrates, Kato is the stronger man in both mind and body.”
Genres · Production History · War
“With flags fluttering, the cast stoically stands at attention, with tears streaming down their stiff upper lips. Even with their country’s destruction, the boys reflect a military mentality, still in service to their country.”
“Being beautiful fights trivializing and ironization by the camera; it saves the women from being regarded as cheap or inscrutable. Elegance and glamour paradoxically grant these subjects an inner life.”
Directors · Experimental & Underground
“For him, film was not only a profession but a mean of investigating cinema as a language, an investigation in which theory and film practice went hand in hand.”
Activist & Political · Reviews
“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other.” — Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (73)
“Attempts to create interesting projects of any sort despite our limitations can sometimes touch us more deeply than slick illusions that — literally by design — hide a lot of skill and effort, yet, in so doing, also hide something of the crazy courage it takes just to be human.”
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
“Your body is a microcosm of all existence.” — Death: A Love Story
“If the silent period showed the flashes of brilliance as well as the unevenness of Barnet’s talent, the next few years would see him produce two worldwide masterpieces that place him as a precursor of French Poetic Realism and the work of Jean Renoir, as well as an influence on the French New Wave through the works of Truffaut, Godard, and Rivette.”
Activist & Political · SF & Fantasy
“Veering away from jingoistic portrayals of ‘us’ and the ‘Other,’ these films advocate instead a complex and globally entwined future of hybrid identities along with critical consideration of the political and cultural consequences of advanced technology.”
Like Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., Christopher Nolan’s Inception, or Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch invites the viewer to deconstruct a narrative puzzle – nested realities, stories embedded[…]
Producer as Auteur – The Exile is a swashbuckler, written by, produced by, and starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. It was the first American film to be completed by the German-Jewish director,[…]
Proud as I am of New York for approving gay marriage (see my dissection of THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT, here) I can’t help but see marriage itself as some[…]
Standing in an aquarium with his arms outstretched, the Creature from the Black Lagoon makes a cameo appearance in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, but his presence is anything but gratuitous. Like everything else in[…]
Anyone who’s seen any of the GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO movies must surely notice the similarities between Strauss-Kahn and the unsavory sex addicted pervs in high places that are the targets of our avenging heroine, Lisbeth Salander.
Swedish Sensationsfilms, by Daniel Ekeroth. Brooklyn: Bazillion Points Press, 2011. Trade paperback. $19.99. Thanks to the lurid popularity of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Sweden has perhaps become in the popular American[…]
Lost Horizons Beneath the Hollywood Sign, by David Del Valle. Albany, GA: BearManor Media, 2010. Paperback. $27.95. 458 pp. David Del Valle collects. Among other things, he collects movie people. Lost Horizons[…]
Male Bisexuality in Current Cinema: Images of Growth, Rebellion and Survival, by Justin Vicari. Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2011. Paperback. $45.00 In analyzing the 1970s cinematic Eurodecadence, the Italian-originated school[…]
Back to the Future, by Andrew Shail and Robin Stoate. London: BFI Film Classics, Palgrave Macmillan. 2010. Paperback, $15.00 In his State of the Union address of February 4, 1986, Ronald[…]
DATELINE CANNES, May 18, 2011. The films of Belgian brothers Jean Pierre and Luc Dardenne give new meaning to the term motion picture. Their protagonists are continually on the move,[…]
