Category: Threes

Her Very Own I recently watched “In the Cut,” and found its connectives strange and exciting. So I went to this to see them when young and raw. Supposedly, this is Campion’s first long form film. It didn’t quite work as a film the first time because it is so fractionated. Her earlier “Passionless Moments”… Continue reading A Girls Own Story (1984)

Contagious Brokenness Down the road from me is a coven of Christian filmmakers. It is a school and the purpose is to make films that evangelize. This fascinates me; generally their stories are about fighting the devil, a narrative that encompasses both what is in the film and what surrounds the making of the film.… Continue reading Antichrist (2009)

Yellow Bricks Heard There are three kinds of film that I value and treat differently: those who truly leverage dance, space or sound. I have not yet found one that exploits mathematical space, and would add that when it appears, probably from Ruiz and Greenaway who come close. Of those three, we have some interesting… Continue reading August Rush (2007)

Dimensional It wasn’t until Tarkovsky that we got a truly dimensional awareness in our camera, and not until “Finding Nemo” that it hit the mainstream. There was a hiccup there with the first “Star Wars” and “Soy Cuba”, but it faded fast. Not that we didn’t always want a swooping camera. Here is the first… Continue reading A Dash Through the Clouds (1912)

Graphic As I write this, “Shawshank Redemption” is IMDB’s number two top movie of all time. I find that absolutely fascinating. The prison movie isn’t quite a genre to itself because the story possibilities vary so. But there is a definite collection of cinematic devices that are used in nearly all of them, only “Silence… Continue reading 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932)

Wild Things One recipe for a whole narrative is to create a world, a character and a situation, each affecting the others while containing them. It is a hard, hard thing to do cinematically, but look at what has been done here. The world is conveyed by our character passing through it. It is a… Continue reading Her (2013)

The Rule of Threes My own estimation is that this is a pretty poor movie cinematically, with the exeption of the then-shocking juicy exuberance of the beach scene. But it is crackling good storytelling and that overcomes the wooden direction and uninspired acting. I’m a believer in the power of structure in stories. Here we… Continue reading From Here to Eternity (1953)

Shined Up I decided to watch this after Polanski’s “The Tenant” and that was probably a bad choice, because that film is precious. This one consists of three elements, typical of the King formula. The first is the expression of terror, shaped safely so that you can watch but not be personally threatened. I think… Continue reading 1408 (2007)