The Filmwell landscape is well populated with Certified Copy posts (like the wonderful meditations found here and here). And it seems appropriate that this film is considered and reconsidered at this site. As a new contributing writer, I almost feel as if offering a post on this Kiarostami is like a rite of passage into […]
MORE THAN A FEW filmmakers have plotted a career path or artistic journey from documentary to fictional cinema. For some, it’s a fairly straight path. Krzysztof Kieślowski shot a doc on the Polish court system, where he met a lawyer who became his screenwriter and the rest was less history than art. Other journeys are […]
There is an interesting discussion on Andy Crouch’s recent essay about the “common good” brewing in the comments section of Alan Jacob’s response. I tentatively agree with a few of the points made in the back and forth that can be found at those two links. What I do find fundamentally constructive about Crouch’s overall theological […]
THIS MAY BE LESS A REVIEW than a reflection, on 2011 Cannes favorite Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, now available on DVD — from varied angles of view, ranging from the objectively-technical to the subjectively-personal. First, a technical primer, or refresher, for some– on focus. Recall that in bright light, the camera opening is […]
FLATLAND IS A 19TH CENTURY inter-dimensional head-trip, still popular with math and computer geeks, a fantasy of a two-dimensional being whose mind is blown by his encounters with other dimensions. (Among other things, he discovers that the elite of his own world knew about the existence of a third-dimension, but hid that knowledge from the […]
I’m beginning to wonder: How many cinematic masterpieces will I miss in my lifetime because nobody has bothered to make them available in America? This question is on my mind because I’ve just watched my imported blu-ray of Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy a fourth time, and my review will go up tomorrow at Image. It’s […]
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.” (David Foster Wallace) It is hard to witness the simple acrobatics of Certified Copy and […]
Reports are spreading that Abbas Kiarostami is directing Juliette Binoche in a French-language romance.
David Bordwell spreads the word: Kiarostami’s latest is magnificent. Shocking, I know.