Nice smorgasbord, Jeffrey. Keeping the food movie conversation going… When Chocolat was in theatres, two widely varying responses deepened my appreciation of the film; Frederica Mathewes-Green brilliantly and forcefully made the case for what bothered me about the film, then Loren Wilkinson (Regent College) drew out what was right about the film – as is […]
A little something to commemorate the occasion, forty years ago today: 11:35AM, August 8, 1969. from I Am Sam (Jessie Nelson, 2001) Edited from Wikipedia: In Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting the four main characters walk towards a climactic drug deal processing the “wrong” way across a street crossing: the scene takes place as they walk out […]
Only you can stop this killing. You’ve got to make love with me! You can see why the God-haunted, Total-Depravity-Of-Man-obsessed ex-Calvinist Schrader would be drawn to this landmark supernatural thriller. But his sensibilities are all wrong for it, and the genius – not to mention the spiritual frisson – of the masterful original is completely […]
If you’re hoping for a horror movie, Zombie will disappoint. Even seemingly climactic scenes mystify rather than thrill: they pay off only in mood and a slow accumulation of character detail. Eventually, even the basic narrative seem to dissipate. Forced to fill in narrative gaps by intuition, we must assemble scraps of dialogue and details of behaviour into our best guess about what’s going on – a narrative strategy that forces us to “lean in” to the story, heightening our attention and tuning us to nuance, atmosphere, suggestion. However much we succeed in making sense of the story on repeat viewings, we’re left with unsettling questions, unsure we’ll ever have the full story. Kind of like life.
Psychologically complex, genuinely sexy, hauntingly sad – and when it comes to the creepy stuff, Cat People plays for keeps. Tourneur’s aren’t called “supernatural thrillers” for nothing: the films are both thrilling and theological. The supernatural is rendered spiritual, otherworldliness is grounded in the everyday world, and sin and the human condition are taken seriously.
Film-makers Shaping The Course Of History Trusted sources speculate that the 2008 hit film Happy-Go-Lucky may have triggered recent FDA approval of ground-breaking new medication, placing director Mike Leigh among a small but influential group of film-makers that includes such luminaries as Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Errol Morris, and Krzysztof Kieslowski. The landmark Errol Morris […]
Between 1909 and 1915, photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky traveled throughout Russia recording scenes of Russian life in vivid colour. The images seem anachronistic: we’re used to seeing the early twentieth century in monochrome, and – apart from the clothing and machinery – many of these arresting pictures could come from last month’s National Geographic. R.J. Evans […]
“Don’t you ever think about sin or guilt?”
“Why don’t you ask yourself the same question?”
Few films record the subtle transitions of the human soul with such reality and mystery, and with an artistry that seems so refreshingly artless.
From Abbas Kiarostami, “10 On Ten” I don’t believe the job of a filmmaker is to excite or move the viewer merely through creating special moments. By simply showing the reality, one can make people think about their own and other people’s acts or behaviour, and see and accept reality as it is. It’s from […]