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)
Directors · Festivals & Awards
A Handful of Keepers: The 40th New Directors/New Films Festival
“Kudos to the Vegas for showing not only the grimness of hustling, but also the ordinariness. As Clemente dresses, his middle-aged, matronly partner puts on her reading glasses to count the cash.”
Cinemas of Poetry and Violence: The 40th International Film Festival Rotterdam (2010)
Rotterdam’s edge is intact despite increasing hints of commercialism
Asian · Comedy · Festivals & Awards
The New-Style Comedy: Wai Ka-Fai and the Hong Kong International Film Festival (2011)
“This wonderfully flexible approach to movie-making explains why Wai and To’s films seem so alive to every implication — unlike most current U.S. comedies, where directors carefully steer around obstacles and pretend not to notice flaws in the set-up.”
Culture and the Individual Talent: Three Filmmakers on Male Mid-Life Crisis
“A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries.” —Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: A Blonde in Love, The Lighthouse, The Clowns, Senso, Our Hospitality, William S. Burroughs: The Man Within
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
The King of Chutzpah: On the Singular Pleasures of Phil Silvers
“Silvers raised the smart-aleck, rapid-fire monolog to high art.”
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica
The Complete Exile: The Films of Carlos Atanes
“These shoestring-budget shot-on-video works already demonstrate Atanes’ characteristic gifts for composition and staging combined with a knack for finding bleakly evocative locations that reinforce his themes of power, oppression, exile or, entrapment and the dream of alternate realities where freedom might be possible.”
You Had Me at “Farrier”! Matt Thompson and Adam Reed Supply Cheap Thrills for the Socially Challenged in Archer
Like a straight, poorly drawn, less fluid Ambiguously Gay Duo
For Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes)
The Down-to-Earth must know She cannot rival the Sky We move on suspended Between Reality and Dream Between Oblivion and Eternity Through a Labyrinth of Evergreens cjk 8/10/05
Books · Exploitation & Erotica
Sweden is a place for (violent) lovers: Ekeroth’s ‘Swedish Sensastionsfilms’ (book)
Ekertoth has dug up a million idle hours of eye-to-the-grindstone page-turning sensation for curious readers, and they’d be doing a disservice to cinema, Sweden, and Satan, to miss it
Sleeping Beauties
The Strange Case of Angelica, dir. Manoel de Oliveira Sleeping Beauty, dir. Catherine Breillat On the face of it, the story of sleeping beauty should be a terrible subject for[…]
Her Eyes Were Wide and Glazed: The Uncanny Valley part 2
These kids are aping anime, creating a dead look about their pupils, removing all glimmer of intelligence from their face as if trying to pass as a zombie in a post-Romero school environment, where any glimmer of humanity is met with devouring and slobber.
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