Archive for the ‘Film & TV’ Category
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
It won. This narrow, simplistic, disappointing little film won the Oscar.
No, I’m not shocked. Nor am I disappointed with the Academy — though it has been on an admirably strong run in this century (No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire), this is also the group that elevated both Shakespeare in Love and Titanic to the pantheon. But I am annoyed that such a flawed movie has managed to achieve this amount of acclaim, and that The Hurt Locker is, even more gratingly, regarded now as an “important” film. It is not important – not in the way, at least, that great works of art (cinema included) are capable of being.
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Tags: Iraq, Kathryn Bigelow, The Deer Hunter, The Hurt Locker, Vietnam
Posted in Film & TV, Foreign Affairs, Myth | Comments Off
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
"Blue Experiment", by Marguerita Bornstein (2008)
Marguerita Bornstein – an artist who has in the past been so well known that her first name sufficed to identify her to millions – is the kind of person whose need to create, and whose talent for it, causes her to work across a range of forms. Illustrator, animator, painter, sculptor, and mixed media artist, she has been lauded for drawings that have graced the covers of major magazines and for her contributions to post-modern art exhibitions. “One of the strongest and most sexual works in the show,” wrote a reviewer of 1997’s Sex/Industry (Stefan Stux Gallery, New York), “the mixed media work by Marguerita uses a metal box, an old gourd, and a coconut to create a piece more honestly sexual and arousing than most of the anatomically correct phalluses and cartoon animal jokes in the main gallery.” Alas, I can offer no pictures to match this intriguing description. (more…)
Tags: illustration, Marguerita Bornstein, O Rebu
Posted in Art & literature, Film & TV | Comments Off
Sunday, July 5th, 2009
Anamaria Marinca in Cristian Mungiu's "4 Weeks, 3 Months, and 2 Days" (2007)
At the beginning of Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning film 4 Weeks, 3 Months, and 2 Days, the camera lingers on a goldfish in a square bowl. The fish seems to be trying to escape, not by jumping out, but by pushing directly against the glass, its tail thrusting spiritedly but without result.
It is an effective if too obvious metaphor for Romanian society under the latter days of communist strongman Nicolae Ceauşescu; the action here takes place in 1987, two years before the dictator’s fall. As the camera pulls back, we see that the bowl rests on a fold-out table in the dorm room of two female students at a regional technical college. The women are preparing for a trip of some kind. Gabita is packing a bag nervously, while Otilia ventures up and down the halls of the dorm, attempting to buy a pack of Kent cigarettes from a student-run black market dispensary two doors down, and purchasing soap for her friend to add to her baggage.
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Tags: 4 Weeks 3 Months and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu, Das Leben der Anderen, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Posted in Film & TV, Foreign Affairs, History | Comments Off
Monday, April 27th, 2009
Joaquin Phoenix and Vinessa Shaw in James Gray's Two Lovers
Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) does not on the face of it seem like the kind of man who would end up with two attractive lovers at the same time. He is in his mid-thirties and lives with his parents. He works as a delivery man for his father’s antiquated dry cleaning business. He takes black and white photographs as a hobby, but shoots only buildings. He takes medication for a variety of bipolar disorder. And in the opening scene of the film, he attempts to commit suicide (not for the first time, his worried parents remind themselves) by jumping off a pier.
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Tags: gwyneth paltrow, james gray, joaquin phoenix, two lovers, vinessa shaw
Posted in Film & TV | Comments Off
Friday, January 9th, 2009
Sean Penn in Gus Van Sant's "Milk"
Not being a card-carrying progressive — by which I mean only that I’ve long suffered from an instinctive pessimism about what humans are capable of achieving, though it’s a reflex that I’ve gradually gotten better at keeping in check — I’m occasionally struck with a deep sense of amazement (and related feelings of both gratitude and guilt) at the amount of social change that has in fact occurred in the past century. My amazement can be triggered by something as simple as the visual memory of a British pub filled with a thick haze of cigarette smoke (a memory that takes me back only to 1990), an image that feels almost barbaric in comparison with the clear-aired restaurants of today, or by something as shocking — in fact, as forgotten — as the black and white news footage playing behind the initial credits of Gus Van Sant’s Milk, which shows gay men being herded out of taverns and, their faces turned away from the cameras, into police paddy wagons. North American society has travelled quite a distance from that time to this.
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Tags: change, gay rights, gus van sant, harvey milk, milk, sean penn
Posted in Film & TV, History | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
A few years back, I came across the interesting observation — I think it was in an essay on Sophia Coppola — that most directors address only a single theme or question across all the movies they make in their careers, using each film to come closer to an answer they’ll be satisfied with. This observation almost certainly applies to Coppola’s oeuvre to date, which focuses on the lives of alienated young women, just as it applies, with somewhat less consistency, to the careers of directors like Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. And while one might at first hesitate to place Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón in this category — his work, after all, includes a modernization of Dickens’ Great Expectations, a version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, and, of all things, a Harry Potter film — his two greatest films, Y Tu Mamá También and Children of Men, have enough thematic similarity to at least make the question worth raising.
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Tags: alfonso cuaron, children of men, memento mori, y tu mama tambien
Posted in Film & TV | Comments Off
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
The Joker working the room
As superhero movies go, The Dark Knight is certainly the best of the bunch — although why Christian Bale’s perfectly normal voice had to descend to a guttural rasp every time he put on his bat helmet escapes me, and one must also assign a few demerit points to the filmmakers for portraying the Russian national ballet as a group of blond and unfeasibly pneumatic ski bunnies. But it’s entertaining and occasionally thoughtful, which is more than one can normally ask of the genre.
The late Heath Ledger, as widely proclaimed, is indeed the best actor in the film. His portrayal of the Joker is far less cartoonish than Jack Nicholson’s own go at it, and Ledger takes the character seriously, giving him a consistency, a style, and a realism wholly absent before. (more…)
Tags: Dark Knight, Guy Debord, Situationist International, the Joker
Posted in Film & TV, History | Comments Off
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
An evil omen — of that there’s no doubt. After Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), hero of Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, shoots and wounds a deer while hunting in the West Texas desert, he comes across a trail of fresh blood crossing at right angles the trail of deer blood that he has set out to follow. Looking through his binoculars, he sees a heavy black fighting dog limping away through the sagebrush. The dog glances back, unaware of Moss’s presence and perhaps looking out for a pursuer, and then continues on.
In medieval folklore, a black dog was one of the forms taken by the devil in his wanderings in the world of men; to the English, a spectral black dog was seen as a portent of death, as were the hounds that took part in the ghostly Wild Hunt of Herne the Hunter. In Goethe’s Faust, somewhat amusingly (to modern minds, at least), Mephisto takes the form of a black poodle, while in the 1976 film The Omen, Gregory Peck’s character is attacked by aggressive Rottweilers in the Etruscan cemetary where he has found the body of the jackal (another important member of this canine mythology) that gave birth to his adopted son and future Antichrist. (more…)
Tags: black dog, bonfire of vanities, no country for old men
Posted in Film & TV | Comments Off
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
I wasn’t a terribly frequent visitor to France 24’s website, but as an English-language expression of the French view of the world, I thought it was a timely and useful alternative to the big media outlets of the “Anglosphere” like CNN and the BBC. Unfortunately, it appears that French President Nicolas Sarkozy does not feel the same way, since he announced on Tuesday that he would be cancelling the year-old channel. “With taxpayers’ money, I am not prepared to broadcast a channel that does not speak French,” he told the media.
What a pity.
Tags: France 24, Sarkozy
Posted in Film & TV, Foreign Affairs | 3 Comments »
