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Damien Bona, 1955-2012
The recent passing of a dear friend and mentor, Damien Bona, came as a shock. He was the co-author of Inside Oscar and the sole author of its sequel, Inside Oscar 2 (among other books). The stance...
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The Myth of Film Language
Sometimes in order to clarify things for oneself it's good to go through old problems and old arguments. * * * “Hitchcock said this to Truffaut back in the day. You know, when they scream in that...
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Cleopatra
Recently I have been thinking about Julio Bressane's Cleopatra (2007). It's a film with a rare kind of tone throughout: it's absorbing and erotocomic, and in its imagination of antiquity it sits...
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Nineteen Fifty-Five
In memory of the late Damien Bona, I'm posting a list of favorite films from 1955 - which was his birth year, but also in his opinion (and that of many cinephiles, I think), an exceptional year for...
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Lazy
Look at these fucking hipsters. Lazing about in a filthy communal house, drinking cheap beer with their cheerios, cheesy ironic music, mumbling about how their lives have no direction. No, no - to be...
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First Impressions
Recently I watched Buster Keaton in Free and Easy (1930), a film I'd never seen before, and which despite its conventionalisms and shaky early sound design (this doesn't strike me as one of the...
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Shorts
Les Dragueurs (1962, above) inaugurates my informal, long-term project to explore Jean-Pierre Mocky's comic-thriller universe. Yes, J-P Mocky, "whose giant oeuvre has yet to really be discovered in...
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Quote of the Day
“I was out to show that there are more meanings in ordinary meanings — of the shallow type required for entertainment — than usually spotted by critics, who imagine that only important art can involve...
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Workers, Potters (Part I)
A familiar cultural script, perennially contested by two "wings" of the 21st century NYTimes-style hegemon. Exhibit A: Joel Stein's less-than-thoughtful defense of Adult Culture, contra Hunger Games,...
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Workers, Potters (Part II)
One thing we should want to take away from the quagmire of cultural politics is that we're doomed if we look to the textual qualities of objects themselves to defeat their placement in cultural...
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Workers, Potters (Part III)
It may tempt one to think, as Serge Daney once put it in perspective, that "if there is something missing on the formal level there must be something missing on the political level." One keeps one's...
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Savage
Frankenheimer's early film The Young Savages ('61), not without its merits, exemplifies one of the weird problems of the period's social problem cinema. A lot of directors coming into commercial...
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Pop Goes Precarity
I have unspecific recollections that other people I've listened to have said this before, but ... for purely commercial cinema, 2010's Morning Glory is shockingly decent. Not "subversive"; nothing...
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Workers, Potters (Interlude)
A problem with rah-rah popular culture criticism is the exaggeration of all discussion into "likes" and "dislikes," thumbs up and thumbs down. This diminishes and perhaps neuters real critique - as...
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Prolific Psychotronic
Taken from Michael J. Weldon's Psychotronic Video Guide:"These are some directors who made the most psychotronic movies (not necessarily the best). All of them have their fans (believe it or not)....
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"Amazing"
Should verisimilitude be a concern ... decades from now, fiction representing American life circa 2012 would do well to incorporate liberally into the dialogue the word "amazing." The world I inhabit...
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A General Note on Legitimacy
Certain filmmakers, say Nicolas Winding Refn or Quentin Tarantino, interest me for a number of reasons - but not necessarily because I think they offer complex investigations of ethics - or, in cases...
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Not So Funny
"In the first edition of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the Oompa-Loompas were members of an African tribe displaced by Willy Wonka to the northern industrial hinterland. Not quite...
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Human Comedy
Bernie: Here is a movie with people who look and talk like people one meets outside the frame of a movie screen. Nevermind that the lines between fiction and documentary blur here; the point is the...
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