Category: Threes

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 based on storyboards as panels. The implications are… Continue reading The Dark Knight (2008)

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 adventure with the shifting of watcher and writer.… Continue reading The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)

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 it connects deeply, and this does. You might see… Continue reading Beauty #2 (1965)

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 fact that film CAN BE art is what underlies… Continue reading Beautiful Losers (2008)

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 to the obsession of being. Here we have a… Continue reading Beau-père (1981)

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 music just flows in to be ‘liked’ or… Continue reading Be Glad… (1970)

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 case, instead of playing with a genre, they… Continue reading Barton Fink (1991)

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 peeling of the spacesuit, to the marvellous suits she… Continue reading Barbarella (1968)

Dancer’s Eyes I haven’t enjoyed a movie this much in years. One filmmaking challenge I have been puzzling over for years is how to film dance. It is not enough to have a camera placed in a stationary place as if sitting in a theatre looking at a stage. When I am at a physical… Continue reading Ballets Russes (2005)

Circular Breathing I knew this filmmaker from “10 Canoes,” which was pretty delicate. I had also heard a variety of things about this film, but still I was not prepared for how deep the adventure would go. Most folks seem to comment on the character and his journey; it has some engaging moments and supposedly… Continue reading Bad Boy Bubby (1993)