Dive into the archives.
- Regular Lovers
It’s three hours long, in French, features stark high-contrast black and white cinematography, and was made and released in its native country three years ago. So why is Regular Lovers the arthouse sensation of New York right now?
Because it’s there. And it’s great. Working on a Rivettian scale of narrative sprawl but keeping his work [...]
- Oscar Noms:
Letters from Iwo Jima!
Mark Wahlberg!
The Lives of Others!
- Letters from Iwo Jima
Went to the Sunshine with my friend Tim last night and caught up on the last of the late-2006 glut of movies that I’ve been dying to see. And I saved one of the absolute best for last. About a quarter of the way through Letters from Iwo Jima, one realizes that it belongs in [...]
- Yay.
Another DVD review at Reverse Shot by me. Yay.
- It Happens Again…
Okay, I know I shouldn’t care about awards shows, but I do, because when I was young, these programs were the earliest way I came into contact with the notion that some films are great and should be rewarded and sought out for those purposes.
But seriously guys:Seriously. What were you thinking?
- Contemplative Cinema Blog-A-Thon - Play Time (1967) as Spiritual Treatise
This outrageously long blog-post was written in response to Harry Tuttle’s month-long blog-a-thon on ‘Contemplative Cinema’ over at Unspoken Cinema.
Let’s talk about ‘contemplative cinema’ a bit. What’s ‘contemplative cinema’? Glad you asked.
Harry Tuttle of Unspoken Cinema, in the explanatory page for his ‘Contemplative Cinema Blog-a-Thon,’ identifies it as a recent trend (he places it [...]
- Alice Coltrane (1937-2007)
People weren’t happy when John Coltrane’s wife Alice replaced McCoy Tyner the legendary saxophonist’s pianist. And why would they be? After all, Tyner was (and still is) considered one of the two or three definitive jazz pianists of the latter half of the twentieth century and a definitive force in shaping Coltrane’s sound, where Alice [...]
- Ketchup
Isn’t that just the worst clip-art ever?
So I’m back in New York, as I said. Let’s catch up on a few things that’ve happened recently:
1. Saw Children of Men. This is very good! Daunting and moving in a way I hadn’t expected - with an extraordinary sense of rhythm, and those amazing Emmanuel Lubezki long-takes. [...]
- Back in NYC / My Sweater
Got into New York last night - too exhausted to unpack, really. I ended up going to sleep at 9:00 or so.
Woke up this morning and unpacked. Finally figured out what caused a massive stain on a white shirt I had packed in the bag last fall. A piece of charcoal!(?) Sucks!
And then I realized [...]
- The Queen
Finally saw this today with my dad. Thoughts:
1. On a formal level, the film cannot be described as anything other than a thorough success, with a completely thought-out understanding of the production of image and the problem of celebrity. What could have turned into a Greengrass-scale atrocity (a fictionalized depiction of the paparazzi chase that [...]
