Mulsim Porn I’m interested in what makes Muslim porn different. It surely exists, but you won’t be finding much on IMBD. Porn is a special sort of film. I believe that film in general is where we do most of our experiments in how we reason about...
Nicolas Cage is Charlie Kaufman, a confused L.A. screenwriter overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy, sexual frustration, self-loathing, and by the screenwriting ambitions of his freeloading twin brother Donald. While struggling to adapt "The Orchid Thief," by Susan Orlean, Kaufman's life spins from pathetic to bizarre. The lives of Kaufman, Orlean's book, become strangely intertwined as each one's search for passion collides with the others'.
Abject Folding I am writing a book about “folding” in film. That’s a term I have coined to describe all the parallel levels that have become part of the film vocabulary, among them self-reference, reflection self-aware irony and timeshifting. I love these films. They are always...
A recently retired man embarks on a journey to his estranged daughter's wedding, only to discover more about himself and life than he ever expected.
Which Film? Brando invented the modern acting technique of giving you two films: the one in which the characters exist, and another in which the actors exist. Nicholson has developed that into something rather clever. The basic job is the same, to inhabit a character and...
In New York City in the days following the events of 9/11, Monty Brogan is a convicted drug dealer about to start a seven-year prison sentence, and his final hours of freedom are devoted to hanging out with his closest buddies and trying to prepare his girlfriend for his extended absence.
Figure Skating There are two ways to look at figure skating. You can judge it as a matter of difficulty or a matter of grace. It used to be the grace that trumped. I watch figure skating and films because of how they enrich my lives....
Rodrigo Garcia's Ten Tiny Love Stories follows the stories of ten women with very different emotional and psychological experiences across ten scripted monologues.
One Multi-expressed Love Story This has been termed an experiment because it is unusual, but it is more of an adventure into the space of the written word. Garcia is a writer. Writers use words as knives to open spaces to inhabit. With this particular kind of...
Things aren't looking so good for television clown Banana's career, and the fact that his estranged wife, Suzi, has just been arrested for assaulting his girlfriend, Lily, just serves to compound Banana's despair.
Lost Characters You have a few choices when sitting down to write a story. One of these is to decide what sort of agency your characters have. To my mind, the best storytellers start with a world, a notion of sweeps within that world that creates...
A basketball star is booted out of the NBA when his on-court antics go too far, so he poses as a woman and joins the WUBA.
Tootsie Got Game One of the most disturbing trends in film is how we have started manufacturing “special audience” films. They used to have their own lives, their own autheticity. Here we have a mindless copy: “Tootsie” plays basketball. This goes beyond dumb and stereotypical —...
Cronenberg Chronicles This little feature was made to promote the movie and is included on the DVD. It shows a real problem in filmmaking. The actual movie was dumb, made for dummies. The dynamics behind how it was designed and to some extent executed is a matter...
A successful TV star during the 1960s, former "Hogan's Heroes" actor Bob Crane projects a wholesome family-man image, but this front masks his persona as a sex addict who records and photographs his many encounters with women, often with the help of his seedy friend, John Henry Carpenter. This biographical drama reveals how Crane's double life takes its toll on him and his family, and ultimately contributes to his death.
Soldiering, Winking, Filming Paul Schrader simultaneously fascinates and repels me. That’s because he has such intelligent ideas for films, and then makes then in such a pedestrian fashion the inspiration is all but trod away. And his ideas are so very clever in addition to being intelligently...
Eight women gather to celebrate Christmas in a snowbound cottage, only to find the family patriarch dead with a knife in his back. Trapped in the house, every woman becomes a suspect, each having her own motive and secret.
3 Women Really I had a lot of trouble with this film. I get what it is trying to do and particularly appreciate the notion. The distance between the story and the music is like that great bowling alley scene in “Buffalo 66” (and the similar...
