A Broadway artiste turns a faded film star's comeback vehicle into an artsy flop.
42nd Street in the Rain The colour musical film is a strange beast. Hollywood explored many of its possibilities. And people did buy lots of tickets. But until very recently, musicals were all but dead. That’s because they were never able to create a self sustaining...
A biopic depicting the life of filmmaker and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes from 1927 to 1947, during which time he became a successful film producer and an aviation magnate, while simultaneously growing more unstable due to severe obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Three Characters We all live in our own movies, and particularly like movies of people who do so more literally. Here are three in one film: Martin Scorsese: My regular readers know that I have been very critical of his films. Sure, they are crafted well enough,...
Batman raises the stakes in his war on crime. With the help of Lt. Jim Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman sets out to dismantle the remaining criminal organizations that plague the streets. The partnership proves to be effective, but they soon find themselves prey to a reign of chaos unleashed by a rising criminal mastermind known to the terrified citizens of Gotham as the Joker.
The Noir Card Two things interesting about this for me. (I’ll let others talk about Heath.) One is how much more of a comic book it is than a film. I don’t mean that it is sillier or more fantastic, but that the values seem to be...
Born under unusual circumstances, Benjamin Button springs into being as an elderly man in a New Orleans nursing home and ages in reverse. Twelve years after his birth, he meets Daisy, a child who flits in and out of his life as she grows up to be a dancer. Though he has all sorts of unusual adventures over the course of his life, it is his relationship with Daisy, and the hope that they will come together at the right time, that drives Benjamin forward.
Clockworks Fincher understands cinematic narrative construction and has the craft to match. I fell under his spell during “Fight Club”. The idea there was to play a game with inner narrative. It was, I think when Pitt first found his way into full collaboration with a director’s...
The movie has a fixed point of view showing a bed with two characters on it, Sedgwick and Piserchio. Chuck Wein is heard speaking but is just out of view. Sedgwick is wearing a lace bra and panties, and Piserchio, wearing only jockey shorts, engage in flirting and light kissing. Wein asks Sedgwick questions seemingly designed to harass and annoy her. Piserchio is more or less a bystander not interacting with Wein. The dialogue seems created adlib and no conclusions are reached in the film. The only conceivable climax is when Sedgwick finally becomes so mad, she throws a glass ashtray at Wein, breaking it.
Seduction Most of what Warhol does for me is of the “oh, I get it” variety of art, where a statement is supposed to trigger an insight and the insight is the art. Its an indirection of agency, and wears out its effect quickly. But sometimes...
This documentary follows the lives and careers of a collective group of do-it-yourself artists and designers who inadvertently affected the art world.
Slacker Art Here is a wonderful little niche genre. Movies are essentially striving to art. Few qualify. Almost no one can manage the complex juggling act that it takes. It just involves too many people, too many risks, too many dependencies on happy accidents. But the...
Rémi is a man trapped in a deteriorating marriage. When his wife is unexpectedly killed in a car accident, Rémi is left with his stepdaughter, Marion, who chooses to stay with him rather than live with her birth father. After the initial shock passes, Rémi is caught off-guard when Marion begins expressing her attraction to him. Initially repulsed, Marion's mature beauty wears him down as he finally caves to her seductions.
Music as Sex Nabokov's "Lolita" is a milestone in literature -- the narrator is obsessed to the point where anything he says is at least synthesised out of that obsession and at worse fabricated. It is only about sex in so far as giving a focus...
Be Glad for the Song Has No Ending is the eighth album by the Incredible String Band, featuring Mike Heron, Robin Williamson, Licorice McKechnie and Rose Simpson. It is the soundtrack for a film of the same name, and was released on Island Records in March 1971, failing to chart in either the UK or US. It would be the first album from the band on the Island label and the last to feature Joe Boyd as the producer.
Woven Tongues I encountered one of those popular psychology ideas recently, the one that says that the music that was on the radio when you were 13 determines your taste in music. I supposed it could be true. I have a deeply sculpted life in cinema but...
A renowned New York playwright is enticed to California to write for the movies and discovers the hellish truth of Hollywood.
I'll Show You the World of the Mind Any Coen film is worth traveling to see. All of them are enterprises about the enterprise of film-making or writing, but you never know what little side voyage we're going on, what creases of creation we're exploring. In this...
In the far future, a highly sexual woman is tasked with finding and stopping the evil Durand-Durand. Along the way she encounters various unusual people.
Which Skin? There are only a few films that can be called roots. 1968 generated two of them, “2001” and this. “2001” is about the ambiguities of who is narrating. This is about the ambiguities of where the skin is. From the very beginning, the prurient...
