Katrin Gebbe’s first feature, Nothing Bad Can Happen, quite impressively made it all the way to Cannes in 2013. It is a hard enough film to watch that it met with mixed reception. From reviews I have scanned (so, consider this unscientific), most are repelled by the film because it does all kinds […]
The Emmy Awards are weird for a few reasons. We know that the nomination and voting process makes any Emmy honor kind of dubious. The award exacerbates the age-old craft vs. popularity issue in mainstream media. It has always been difficult to tell the difference between the comedy and drama categories, as really good TV […]
“…hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.” (W. Brueggemann) — The gist of the apocalypse of The Leftovers finds its origin in the pre-exilic prophets of Israel, whose images of judgment and […]
In the first season of Rectify, Daniel Holden was released from death row to a town with differing opinions regarding his innocence. One of the more unexpected responses to this conundrum was that of his devout sister-in-law, Tawney. We could quickly count appearances of the “bible study girl” in network television or date night cinema, […]
Daniel Holden has been on a Georgia death row for the rape and murder of his girlfriend for 19 years and has been released following new DNA evidence. Newly loose upon the world, he is distant, vague, as motivationally inscrutable as a Flannery O’Connor anti-hero. His fiercely loyal sister and parents are getting used to […]
Pawlikowski’s Ida is a throwback to an era during which directors took their craft seriously enough to produce worlds with such haunting precision they still seem a bit more important than our own. There is much Bresson, Dreyer, and even a little Bergman in Ida. It is full of solid building blocks of composition; basic thematic […]
(Prior thoughts on Mad Men can be found here.) There are a few moments in which Mad Men has deposited a great deal of existential crisis on the shoulders of a biblical reference, the fleeting Eucharistic reference in “The Strategy” a good example. Mad Men is an exercise in an invigorating form of historiography that […]
“With such a console in his office, an executive can call for the curves that he needs on the screen; then, by touching the screen with the light pen, he can order the computer to calculate new values and redraw the graphs, which it does almost instantaneously.” (Via HBR Blog) — The IBM System/360 […]
On paper, Upstream Color ticks a remarkable number of my boxes: Carruth? ✓ Lengthy sequences sans dialogue? ✓ Auteur struggle vibe? ✓ Economy of image across multiple planes of action? ✓ Responsive PR contact? ✓ Fetching composition? ✓ Alternative distribution? ✓ Arboreal? ✓ Really cosmic stuff going on? ✓ Pascalian images of the “condition of men”? ✓ Lack of exposition? ✓ Rudy Rucker meets Orchid […]