Fun and Games: On Michael Haneke’s 2007 Remake of His 1997 Funny Games
“Should we enjoy beingmanipulated?”
Plumbing the Depths of Capitalism: On Force of Evil
“It was like going down to thebottom of the world”
Where Do We Find Ourselves? John Cassavetes’ Faces Turns 40
“How can one be a maverickindependent filmmaker, and be an attentive,lovinghusband and father?”
Activist & Political · Reviews
Fascism, American Style: Revisiting Kazan and Schulberg’s A Face in the Crowd
“Goodnight, you stupid idiots. Goodnight, you miserable slobs.”
Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Paradise Betrayed: Talking with Terence Davies About Of Time and the City
“You can’t stop time. It stops you.”
Directors · Essays · Writers & Critics
Counter Clockwise: Or Lay Quiet Awhile with Ed and Id Molotov
Re-examining the Crossed Wires in Kubrick’s and Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange
A Real Director’s Cut: Cassavetes Edits Himself in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
It is the subjective fever dreamof a psyche carving fantasy out of reality as he goes.”
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: La Roue, The Last Emperor, Lost in Beijing, Popeye the Sailor, Satantango, Vampyr
La Roue (Abel Gance, 1922) Abel Gance’s La Roue is a wild poem of a movie. French audiences saw the film at its 1922 premiere in four parts over three[…]
Think Globally, Role-play Locally: On Olivier Assayas’ Thriller Boarding Gate
“Its failures are what make it sowatchable.”
Blood, Sweat, and Canvas: How Barton Fink Can Set You Free
“All the world’s a hell ten feet square”
What’s Your Edition Number? The Replicanting of Blade Runner: Final Cut
“Ford’s mission seems of no particular consequence. You get the feeling of not getting anywhere of being part of the atmosphere of decay.”
Like Wildroot Cream Oil, it makes your hair stand on end!
Between this heavy stuff floating around about NASA guy Edgar Mitchell and now today, Clark C. McClelland. (No link, because of weird interference, but google his name and take your[…]
3 Westerns I Watched This Weekend
GOOD – Western Union (Fritz Lang 1941) This is one of Lang’s first color films. He shot it in Arizona’s Painted Desert with special attention to the natural scenery, and[…]
The Rote High School Persecution of Ellen Page
There’s something definitely original about the scattershot editing collage techniques of THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS (2007), getting a belated US DVD release after a year in Canada and the broken film[…]
America is Hard to See (Emile De Antonio; 1970)
Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 Presidential campaign started on a premise that would sound downright exotic coming from a member of the United States Senate today. He believed that US military agression[…]
The land beyond beyond….
I’ve yet to brave the crowds for Dark Knight, but I’m sufficiently death-obsessed of late to be fascinated by Heath Ledger’s “Joker from beyond the grave” and all the weird[…]
Summer Movie Essential: NIAGARA (1954)
A strangely soothing, a sun-drenched proto-neo-noir, NIAGARA is one of my favorite Marilyn Monroe movies, up there with DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK and THE MISFITS in its ability to capture[…]
FilmCrit and the Skidoo Epiphany
Over the weekend I read an essay on J.D. Salinger which Janet Malcom published in the New York Review of Books back in that now lost and fabled time, June[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Some Remarks on Bruce Conner and Report
Entering into negotiations with executives at Time, Inc. over the sale of a film he’d shot in Dallas on November 22, 1963, Abraham Zapruder was adamant that his 26.6 seconds[…]
The Pantheon of Macho-Fey
Sounds like some evil tournament Bruce Li would enter to find the man who killed his master, but no – “macho-fey” is a term coined by the celestial Kim Morgan[…]
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