One Time: A few years before we had our daughter, my wife and I were walking in the hills of Caracalla just south of Rome. About halfway through this quiet suburban park we encountered an old sheep that had recently died about five yards from the path. Several of its friends were trying to nuzzle it […]
The Tree of Life is not my favorite Malick film. It is a great experience, and it is saturated with great thoughts about fatherhood, sonship, and the cosmic significance of what happens to us as children. But it lacks the continental vigor that gave birth to Days of Heaven and decades later, The New World, which […]
Silent Souls is a film about death. But the precise pace of this film, which is full of the kind of lengthy driving sequences that lull one into contemplation, provided plenty of room to think about the implications of the dead body in the back seat. There are a lot of ways to think about […]
Wired (ht Jason Morehead) recently ran a short editorial about the geometric rate at which our ability to comment on products and experiences is increasing. Wired is an odd place to find such an editorial, as it has become notorious for product placement and a comment section that can degenerate pretty quickly. But there are […]
Will Osterweil has posted a description of a New Film Criticism over at The New Inquiry. It is full of such doozies as: “For most major film releases, marketing costs a quarter to a third of the production budget; this money goes to establishing a film’s ubiquity and “cultural relevance” while masking its inadequacies, inviting critics […]
The first impulse while watching Submarine is to start thinking about Wes Anderson. It soon becomes clear that this analogy doesn’t quite fit, so you move onto Hal Ashby. This fits a little bit better, but leaves too much wiggle room, so you start thinking about Truffaut. When the san-serifed intertitles, freeze-frames, and Anna Karina […]
The Gospel Coalition recently posted a review of Tree of Life that makes some interesting claims toward the end. I have emphasized the words that caught my attention: “Recently, philosophers have begun asking the question of whether or not film has/will become a new form of thought itself.” “If these analyses turn out to be […]
The Pruitt-Igoe housing project was open for business in 1954, completed in 1956, and destroyed in 1972. It then took four years to knock down the 33 buildings of the modernist development, which had been clustered together a bit northwest of downtown St. Louis in Le Corbusier fashion. The Pruitt-Igoe footprint is now an unexpected […]
Over at Film Journey, Rob Koehler has posted some interesting comments on what really matters in the festival world. He does this by opposing two general approaches to film criticism, which can be identified by the films that interest each type of critic: The difference between these two approaches–both quite simple on their face, yet […]