Dive into the archives.
- The Number 23.
Good God, I’m old.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had a lot to say lately as far as movies go - I’ve seen a lot of them, and recommend nearly all of them. Specifically, if you get the chance to see:
Syndromes and a Century
Hot Fuzz
Red Road
The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
Elisa, My Love
There’s Always Tomorrow
Go for it. They’re all [...]
- Saura Retro - The Hunt
This is part two in a continuing series of posts about the Carlos Saura retrospective at the Walter Reade Theater. Part three, on Saura’s Peppermint Frappe, will be posted tomorrow evening.
The Hunt (La Caza) was Saura’s first real internationally celebrated work, and as such a cornerstone in his development as a filmmaker. A prizewinner at [...]
- Saura Retro - The Hooligans/Lament for a Bandit
I’m going to try to catch as many films as I can in Lincoln Center’s Carlos Saura retrospective over the next few weeks. That’s how much Cria! impressed me when I saw it last fall.
So let’s start:The Hooligans (Los Golfos) was Saura’s debut and an auspicious one at that. Falling straightaway into that great mid-century [...]
- “Dear Sister” and Avant-Garde Video
If having Andy Samberg around on SNL over the last few years has done anything to the program, it’s given the show a bit of a kick in the ass. Samberg, one of the show’s youngest castmembers and one of the first to recognize the difficulty of producing fresh material in the age of the [...]
- Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)
“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can [...]
- Grindhouse
Fair warning: massive spoilers abound.
Grindhouse, is of course, not a movie - it’s a media presentation put together by nerds to give audiences a sort of heightened-sensory idea of what they were missing by not being poor urban moviegoers (alternately: poor rural drive-in moviegoers) in the 1970s and early 1980s. It’s an advertising gimmick (one [...]
- Slightly French / Douglas Sirk
If there’s a black mark on Douglas Sirk’s career, the director would have you believe it’s Slightly French, his 1949 musical comedy starring Don Ameche and Dorothy Lamour. When asked by interviewer Jon Halliday about the film in the canonical Sirk on Sirk, the director admitted embarrassment over the work and asked that Halliday not [...]
- Tati Double-Feature
On Tuesday I watched the first two films in the French Institute’s monthlong comprehensive Jacques Tati retrospective. The notion of a comprehensive Tati retrospective is, of course, not very daunting, since Tati’s output as a director was limited to six features and four shorts over his nearly 30 year career, but given his acclaim (the [...]
- A Vote for Sanjaya is a Vote for Racism
Let’s get some of my frustrating white-liberal tendencies out of the way: the title says it all. By aligning oneself with the massive voting bloc that’s ironically supporting the horrible American Idol contestant Sanjaya Malakar as a means of taking down American Idol (Howard Stern et. al.), we are aligning ourselves with the same sort [...]
- Lots of posts…
..to come in the next day or so. Making up for a week without updates.
