Is the serious Orson Welles ripe for reexamination? By the time he made the Trial, he was merely laying claim to the international art film he’d done so much to found. The undeniable stylistic verve, the sly quoting of the decade’s big filmmakers, and the narrative ambiguity gave the fish-eye lenses and low angle ceiling […]
I think that Sam Fuller’s work can never get enough recommendation. Sure, a Fuller film is the sort of Hollywood film liable to put off anyone with a congenital aversion to action genres, sensationalist tone, and a hyper-masculinist milieu that flies in the face of serious drama and liberal politics. In fact, after initial early […]
Memento and the Charlie Kauffman-scripted films seem to have started off a mini-genre of off-beat genre independent films. Primer (d. Shane Carruth), at least, wraps science fiction and a little bit of thriller within the realist ethos of the indie film. The results are great.
I don’t want to reveal too much of the narrative […]
Will the cinema ever rediscover the tracking shot? That was my overarching question watching the Taiwanese art film, Goodbye Dragon Inn, the other night. The premise is simple: on the closing night of an old cinema, a martial arts film (Dragon Inn) screens while various characters interact, mostly silently. Composed almost entirely of static long […]
I’ve been crossing off entries on my film scholar list of shame as I discover that Netlix has on them on DVD. Fortunately, it’s been a fun task. Tout Va Bien (dir. Godard and Gorin) was far more fun than I’d anticipated, given the number of things I’d read touting its Brechtian, anti-narrative techniques. Or […]
Finally watched Dog Star Man the other night. (Thanks again to Criterion Collection). The DVD comes loaded with interviews with Stan Brakhage, to which I can only the offer the advice not to listen to it and just watch the films. Either he reduces complex films to simplistic, even cheesy, meanings, or else he spouts […]
Criterion does a wonderful job in their DVD transfers, and I don’t need to talk up all the fine films they rerelease (even if their tastes tend more toward the cultish than mine). But they’ve just put out Bertolucci’s first feature, La Commare Secca/The Grim Reaper, which is just fantastic. Based on a Pasolini story, […]
… each class has to take the interests of the other class into consideration: the workers must acknowledge the importance of profitability, because only a sufficient level of profits and investment will secure future employment and income increases; and the capitalists must accept the need for wages and welfare state expenditures, because these will secure […]
I was underwhelmed by Million Dollar Baby. There are all sorts of aesthetic gripes (and praises) one could parse, but one thing about the film that annoyed me was its dodgy class-regional politics. On the one hand, Maggie/Hilary Swank’s poor upbringing serves as guarantor of her integrity and goodness. On the other hand, we have […]
I can see why Code 46 might not be on someone’s top 10 list of the year (though given the competition, I’m not sure inclusion’s unwarranted), but why was this film so summarily overlooked when it came out? By critics, by the boxoffice, by art house goers. I guess it fell between two stools - […]
The advantage, if you can call it that, of watching a film on DVD is that the little clock lets you know how well the narrative is following the Robert Towne/Syd Field model for effective screenplays. In Collateral, the first plot point comes right at 20 min. on the clock. (The second is a little […]
Source: New York Film Festival
Aside from the theoretical problems with auteurism, a simple practical one impedes would-be auteurists today. Films still aren’t always available, even with video and DVD releases making more movies available than ever in people’s own homes. I have an idea of what a Douglas Sirk film means, for example, from the […]
I just got done watching The Ox-Bow Incident (yes, more dissertation viewing). Did the film really chalk lynch mentality down to repressed/latent homosexuality?
Filmically, it was mix of half 30s classicism and half falt, floodlit B&W expressionism. I’m willing to entertain counterexamples, but I felt as if I were watching the first (unbeknownst) film noir.
Throughout the 1930s. Warner Brothers specialized in low-budget “headliner” films, action-based narratives taking topical material as their basis. Some of these would go on to become foundational texts of the social problem genre (I Am a Fugitive from the Chain Gang, Heroes for Sale, Wild Boys of the Road), but in fact the “headliner” genre […]
It’s a thoroughly entertaining film, and at times smart. Alexander Payne knows how to ratchet up pathos unlike any other contemporary writer-director. And unlike About Schmidt, in which the condescension to its characters curdled, here Payne finds the inner humanism of his pathetic protagonists. I rather liked the loving satire of wine culture and of […]