“I’m the opposite of parched.” (Mike Leigh) Towards the beginning of Happy-Go-Lucky, Poppy and her friends are dancing in a club to Pulp’s “Common People.” This is the song in which Jarvis Cocker cynically croons about a rich girlfriend who wants to slum it for a while (“I said pretend you’ve got no money. […]
(Ed Note: Originally published at Film-Think.) Since Sokurov’s Aleksandra is about Chechnya in the same way The Sun was about Hirohito, or Mother and Son was about a literal maternal relationship, one doesn’t need a degree in Russian politics to grasp his poetic intent. Channeling both Bahktin and Tarkovsky in the way its fluid imagery is […]
(Ed. Note: Originally appeared at Film-Think) 1. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas) – Cycling image by image through the idea of things being revealed and unveiled, the time-lapse Genesis imagery that sets the film in motion culminates in a theologically rich network of visual and thematic allusions – as if Regygada’s natural cinematography needs an additional shove towards […]
(Ed. Note: Originally published at Film-Think.) I am baffled that Mary was not distributed in conjunction to either The Passion of the Christ or The Da Vinci Code hysteria after it played to acclaim at the Venice 2005 festival, even taking the SIGNIS award there. It would have been a helpful point of reference for either […]
(Ed. Note: Originally published at Film-Think.) I have always been troubled by Slacker, as it is been the only Linklater I haven’t been able to enjoy immediately. It is an hour and a half of disconnected dialogue, each scene focused on a conversation or monologue that ends as the character from the upcoming scene appears […]
(Ed. Note: Originally published at Film-Think) The thrill of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and what ultimately makes it a seminal film of modern American spirituality, is the way it drills down through religious experience and finds a character both mythic and contemporary. He is mythic in the sense that his experience is common – […]
I have always had a hard time deciding whether or not I actually like Dark City. On the one hand, it closes with a ramshackle sense of hope, one that rides a tightrope between cartoonish versions of determinism and nihilism. I agree with Peter Chattaway that the director’s cut of the film refocuses some […]
(Ed. Note: Originally published at Film-Think.) The Visitor opens with a glum professor going through the motions. Walter is taking piano lessons in an effort to sustain the memory of his dead piano teacher wife, grading papers in his east coast campus office, dryly delivering papers at a Manhattan conference. Even though he doesn’t admit it […]
(Ed. Note: Originally published at Film-Think.) I was a bit surprised to see the drunk Jewish jazz musician of Taxi Blues wash up on the shore of Ostrov. In Lungin’s earlier film, Pyotor Mamonov plays the westernized odd-ball to an increasingly frustrated Muscovite taxi driver, his perestroika straight man. In Ostrov, Pyotor plays a similar […]