Category: Threes

Dead Bits Arise Most people watch Franco it seems specifically because it is junk, or so they think. The cheapness and (for the era) exotic nudity must give some sort of trailer park thrill. But these films seem important to me. The reason is that today’s most exciting cinema comes from the Spanish tradition of… Continue reading The Erotic Experiences of Frankenstein (1973)

Audrey What a wonderfully flexible this thing is, cinema. Within it, one can structure all sorts of things that can reach us. Probably the two that are the most profound are how movies define fate and sometimes in the breath, love. This is one that deals with both. And the love part has nothing to… Continue reading Every Girl Should Be Married (1948)

Kubrick for Dummies One of the giants of film, Kubrick’s contribution was an exploration of plastic narrative within the story. A simple story just happens and the narrative stance is one of simple observance. Kubrick looked at competing perspectives, for instance ‘2001′ shifts among three perspectives (the human, HAL, the new consciousness), each with its… Continue reading Irreversible (2002)

Waking Life The element that makes cinema unique is the ability to fold: to shuffle time and narrative both by the mind and eye. Nolan showed great promise with ‘Following’, built around a very ambitious narrative structure. It moved the notion of narration way in front of the camera and even beyond, in front of… Continue reading Insomnia (2002)

Volunteer Growth Most films are a matter of manufactured narrative and we watch them to to discover what has been shaped by the filmmaker. Most documentaries are like this as well, because the idea is to illustrate a constructed narrative with reality, giving it more power. But sometimes, and I think very rarely, it is… Continue reading Immokalee U. S. A (2008)

Bad Kurosawa Oh what a curse to be a genius! Here we have a nearly perfect film, perfect in all the ordinarily engineered respects. It is rather haunting, and if you choose to watch it you will find it memorable. But Kurosawa is not merely a maker of well engineered films, together with perhaps a… Continue reading Ikiru (1952)

Simple Folding of a Love Story People forget that ‘Casablanca’ was a B-movie, made quickly and cheaply. Its success depended on its unimportance — several modern trends were being followed by the various artists involved and they had the freedom to go a little further than they could on important films. As with that, so… Continue reading Audition (1999)

Folded Vision, Urges and Space Reflective Engagement I normally write about folding; the most obvious is when a film contains a film or play, but there are a bewildering number of types. The most interesting of these to me is when the film ‘folds’ the watcher in, in some way. The least interesting is when… Continue reading Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

The Dance As a film considered the ordinary way, this is ordinary. It has a common framing device that folds the narrative: a wimpy kid rents lots of Kung Fu movies. Then he enters those movies which here are conflated with dreams. Pretty ordinary by recent standards. He is amazingly unattractive with the worst skin… Continue reading The Forbidden Kingdom (2008)