Science Is Fiction: An Impeccable Eye on Nature
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
The wildlife film seems to be undergoing a renaissance these days, driven not so much by high ideals but by high definition. After all, the recent BBC series/home video sensation Planet Earth found ways to tell amazing stories about the dwindling diversity of our fauna, but it didn’t hurt its appeal that it came along at a time when early adopters would pay good money to gape at footage of whales and polar bears delivered in 1080p resolution. Full story »
"Llik Your Idols" Documents Transgressions of Cinema, L.A. Street Gangs
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Once upon a time, you got your subculture news from sporadic Xeroxed “fanzines,” and if you read about an obscure film that sounded interesting, you often had to get a money order (a pre-PayPal form of remuneration useful for dealing with persons unknown to you) and mail it off to some specialty video shop in some far-off exotic urban center such as Cleveland or New York City, and the person who received that money order would then mail you a musty-smelling VHS cassette (often an illicit dub) to watch in your crappy Fort Sanders apartment. Full story »
"Wendy and Lucy", "Martyrs" Present Two Visions of Women in Peril
Thursday, May 21, 2009
With her plain/cute bob, indie wear, and beat-up Honda, Wendy (Michelle Williams) could be any young woman you know. It will turn out that this is sort of the point. One thing that stands out right away, though, is that she’s good to her dog, Lucy—so scrupulous with walks and feeding and fetch that you recognize instantly that she has a good heart. That’s important information, too. Full story »
French Films with a Familiar Twist
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
It used to be that foreign films were, well, foreign. The stuff that played U.S. art houses and sat sequestered in its separate section in American video stores was distinguished by more than language. There was an artfulness, a patience, a willingness to ask viewers to think more and buck ambiguity less, an overall resistance to the lowest common denominator. Full story »
New Releases Capture Wong Kar-wai's Magic
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
There are a handful of films where the story of their troubled creations threatens to overshadow the films themselves: Apocalypse Now, Heaven’s Gate, Fitzcarraldo, Cleopatra. Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 Ashes of Time isn’t as well-known to most moviegoers as the others on that list, but in many ways its making was every bit as ambitious and as fraught. Full story »
DIY Filmmaking, Before Final Cut Pro
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
With some credit cards, a digital camera, Final Cut Pro, and some willing friends, you can make a movie, then upload it to a sharing site, burn DVD copies, or maybe even take it to one or a dozen of the gajillion film festivals around these days. You can even make some headway with your homemade labor of love—witness the buzz surrounding Trouble the Water, a new documentary based on home video camera footage shot by two Hurricane Katrina survivors. It bears remembering, however, that plenty of filmmakers managed to make films in an earlier time when outside the Hollywood studio system equalled completely off the map. Two lavish, loving new DVD sets eulogize the largely unknown auteurs Eagle Pennell and Don Dohler, managing to rescue some of their best stuff from obscurity and to make the stories behind their work into fascinating films of their own. Full story »
Frozen River: A Chilling Vision of Poverty
Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2009
In American movies, money usually appears in big round figures—tens of thousands owed to a thug or millions nabbed in a daring heist—and the “average” character is middle-class-verging-on-upper, as the spacious apartments, shopping sprees, and second homes attest. Full story »
Shame and Beauty: When nudity works
Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2009
Of all the films deserving of a restoration and a spanking new Blu-ray issue, Caligula is near the bottom of the list. The spawn of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, man of letters/secret screen-trash peddler Gore Vidal, and Italian titty-film director Tinto Brass, Caligula was meant to be an epic and a controversy, the first-wave mainstreaming of porn clad in classical laurels. Upon its initial release in 1979 it turned out to be perhaps the most expensive exploitation film ever made, a gaudy, awful bomb without a cult to lend it a good name. Full story »
"Generation Kill" pulls off the Iraq War story
Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2009
It doesn’t seem like it’s time yet to be watching television and films about the Iraq War for entertainment, does it? It is, after all, still dragging on, and if the electronic media weren’t mostly mirroring the inevitable fatigue many home-front Americans feel, we could watch the real thing on the news every night. Full story »
The Best DVDs of 2008
Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2008
On the list: "Chop Shop" and "30 Days of Night" Full story »
Fear and Secrets
Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2008
Almost any fan of Hunter S. Thompson would have to approach a Thompson bio-doc with some trepidation. Given his well-deserved reputation as a trailblazing journalist and prose stylist—and his equally well-deserved renown as an outsized personality/crank, ripped to the tits on a panoply of narcotics and heavily armed—it’s easy to imagine a filmmaker seeking the proper balance of stories to tell and getting it wrong. Fortunately, Thompson drew Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side). Full story »
Brass Tacks
Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008
The year 2002 was a fantastic time to introduce a cable cop show that defied the formulaic standards of most network genre offerings. HBO was trotting out its first season of The Wire, and at the same time the FX cable network treated audiences to The Shield, another new show that threw light on the labyrinthine complexities and dark back-channels of modern police work. Full story »
Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?
Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2008
It’s one of the most pervasive clichés in movie history: A character watches an unseen TV screen while the sound of Indian war whoops, gunshots, and the over-the-top score of an old B-movie Western signals that it doesn’t matter what he or she is watching. Not all old B Westerns are so easily dismissed, however. Filmmakers such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Anthony Mann have long been acknowledged as major artists by even casual film fans, but hardcore film and Western nerds have had the name Budd Boetticher (pronounced “BET-ick-er”) on their lips for decades. Full story »
Men Alone
Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008
There is nothing small about Genghis Khan, uniter of the Mongols, scourge of Asia in the early 12th century, and, before his death, the ruler of pretty much every acre between the Pacific Ocean and the Black Sea. But the great khan started life, like anyone else, as a child, in this case a minor khan’s son named Temudjin. And thus does Russian director/co-writer Sergei Bodrov find a way to fit the life of Genghis Khan—or at least his early years—within the confines of two hours on a screen in Mongol, new to DVD. Full story »
Urban Renewal
Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2008
In order to attain true movie-geek supremacy, you must find that one failed film which only you can love—and then defend it to the death. But it isn’t easy. Every psychotronic-DVD collector and his disappointed mother knows that The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies is an undeniable American classic, that Battle Royale is a parable for our times, and that Showgirls is no doubt Paul Verhoeven’s one true masterpiece. These days, you really have to dig deep to find a disdained movie to champion because they’re all being endorsed already by other movie-nerds. Full story »