Category: Ones

Acting Cool We are born into the doom of being actors. If we are lucky we discover who we are but until then we go through a process of acting a role. Some movies play with this idea, and “Get Shorty” was one of the most clever of these. It had two elements: that notion… Continue reading Be Cool (2005)

Murderous I am deep into a study for a book on folding in film. “Folding” is a general term for various types of self reference, awareness, self-creation and reflection. The very idea behind my study is that this is a very useful thing to understand and use because it makes things more powerful. When exposed… Continue reading The Auteur Theory (1999)

Two Worlds We live in two worlds with usually hidden doors between. One world is unexpectedly complex, powerful and cosmic in an apparently demented way. The second world we have to put up with. It is a world of rote mechanics and faux imagination. That first world is the world of Phil Dick, something I… Continue reading The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

Script Mysteries Egad. Watching these Suchet versions of Poirot is a real adventure. Following the tradition set by the BBC, each episode has a different adapter and director. The idea is that it is supposed to keep things fresh. After all, the selling points are the characters and the good will of the Christie name.… Continue reading Poirot: Dumb Witness (1966)

Precision Convoy I really have to give the producers credit for how they have tuned this franchise. At some point, the formula will have to outlive Diesel like Bond had to survive after Connery. The fans won’t abandon the series but as with Bond, the constraints will get ever tighter. In the meanwhile, this is… Continue reading Fast & Furious 6 (2013)

Piracy Hitchcock eventually made some transcendent films. But that would be way later than this period, where he did his work as instructed and on time. His contribution to cinema was the invention of the camera whose awareness deviated from the narrative bound in the actors. In other words, the camera sees things and goes… Continue reading Jamaica Inn (1939)

The Disconnected. So much of life consists of invisible missed opportunities. Usually, they are invisible because what we see appears so competent that it seems only natural that it be as it is. This is such an opportunity. Our two characters here are presented competently. Everything else in the project is acceptable. It has a… Continue reading The Business of Strangers (2001)

Bamboozled I usually see these “banned” things and react variously. I think Amos and Andy, for instance is ennobling, and the often respected “Song of the South” disgusting in it racial typing. This one seems pretty offensive too, especially at the beginning where multi-hued cannibals prance around in what must be a near carbon copy… Continue reading Jungle Jitters (1938)

Unsacred Feather Suppose you are a fairly powerful man in TeeVee, and have some standing in the movie world. Suppose also that you have been a poor father to a son that is fairly incompetent at life. He wants to become a filmmaker, and you have big ideas for him that work against his abilities.… Continue reading Keeping Up With the Steins (2006)

Club Exotica One of the several foibles of the United States is that we have no indigenous sexual exotica. All sexual archetypes are inherited from predecessor cultures (excepting the competing African-American cultures), which is one reason — I believe — that US popular culture is so widely consumed internationally. We repackage. Not so with India,… Continue reading Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996)