Paper on Ink Gosh, is this good cinema. It has energy and imagination. It has internal self-reference: the storyteller in the thing has her audience as one of the characters, someone who appears in three persona unknown to each other. The way things are revealed and the timeline is shuffled is wonderful… the way they… Continue reading Ink (2009)
Category: Threes
Films rated three stars out of three
Storm Boy (1976)
Internal Weather I’ve had the advantage of being old, and living in both the US and Australia and raising kids in each. That gives me a perspective on the book before seeing the film. Every so often, a young adult book hits a sweet spot in the national heart. I believe it is because we… Continue reading Storm Boy (1976)
7 Plus Seven (1970)
We Discover The way I think of films is that every film is first about other films and incidentally about life. In referencing or extending our film experience — and at the same time providing tools for folding that experience into life — movies give us tools for life. Or for dreaming, which is much… Continue reading 7 Plus Seven (1970)
9 Songs (2004)
Rock and Roll When I saw Scorsese’s “Last Waltz”, I thought that I would never again see a concert film as true. And I haven’t, until now. The Band were the last popular musicians to tell stories, have nearly all those stories be in the third person and tell them without irony. To do this… Continue reading 9 Songs (2004)
# Inspector Bellamy (2009)
Mystery Man I was never a champion of Chabrol, but I am amazed at what he left as his last film. The film is superficially framed as a detective story but as it progresses it slowly turns inside out as it becomes a discovery about the nature of the detective. This is done so surreptitiously… Continue reading # Inspector Bellamy (2009)
As Tears Go By (1988)
Streets of Mean No better one day film school can be found in watching “Mean Streets” and then this. Superficially they seem the same and Kar-Wai has told us that he patterned this, his first feature after Scorsese’s first. Here’s the lesson: Scorsese belongs to a school of thinking where actors create characters, real extreme… Continue reading As Tears Go By (1988)
How Art Made the World (2005-)
The Skull in the Livingroom Here is a strange idea for a documentary. Make a movie about why movies work, why we cling to them and how they invent our humanity. Tell a story about storytelling. It is put together by a man who himself is a good storyteller; he is presumably a good teacher.… Continue reading How Art Made the World (2005-)
Flirting (1991)
A Caning for Love Heavens be thanked for how Australians and New Zealanders have revived the acting element of film. Everything in the country seems set up to produce performing artists, even talent writers that understand acting, where Brazil produces soccer players and the US lawyers. Here you have three your actresses in essentially their… Continue reading Flirting (1991)
Henry Fool (1997)
We See The Poem Hartley is a major talent, a unique, competent voice in a bramble of sameness. The last project I saw was “No Such Thing,” which is one of those that if you don’t actively avoid it, it hits you deep in your soul and changes you. Like most Hartley projects, it was… Continue reading Henry Fool (1997)
Hereafter (2010)
Chabrolet At a certain point in some filmmakers’ careers, the films cease being discrete works of art and start becoming chapters in an engaging life. Eastwood is not the most weighty artist out there. He has made a couple worthwhile films and much chaff but has developed a growing reputation for cleanliness and efficiency, both… Continue reading Hereafter (2010)