Changed Eye I am interested in these awards, not because of who wins or why. Sure we all have our favourites, but the more we celebrate when someone we value is recognised, the more we endorse this notion of a competition. A competition in the arts? No, I’m interested because I study introspection in film,… Continue reading The 81st Annual Academy Awards (2009)
Tag: p2009
Comments first posted in 2009
Ink (2009)
Paper on Ink Gosh, is this good cinema. It has energy and imagination. It has internal self-reference: the storyteller in the thing has her audience as one of the characters, someone who appears in three persona unknown to each other. The way things are revealed and the timeline is shuffled is wonderful… the way they… Continue reading Ink (2009)
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Puppets This has jokes that often work. It has a genuine pathos that is surprisingly rare and is now the trademark of Apatow productions. It has Hawaii and two women, one pretty the other a beauty. It has a deftly comic foil in the “other boyfriend.” It has some frontal male nudity that probably should… Continue reading Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938)
Magical I think I’d take a dozen of these for one Star Wars sequels. When you get down to it, Star Wars was four things: Kurosawa, Williams and Campbell folded into science fiction, but it was quite thin scifi. It posited a Manichean world — at least originally, where good and evil had some sort… Continue reading Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938)
King Corn (2007)
Field of Dreams Modern documentaries fascinate me. In theory, the documentary category is an investigation, explanation or essay on something, presumably something both real and true. Because there is the supposition that the thing is interesting of worth hearing about for some reason, one assumes that most documentaries would be compelling things. All you have… Continue reading King Corn (2007)
Thirteen at Dinner (1985)
Suchet Sachet Suffers A new batch of old TeeVee Christie adaptations have become available on DVD. I’ve been marching through them valiantly, looking for anything of value. Here it is. This one is good. The story on which it is based is one of Christie’s more interesting experiments in playing with the mystery form: moving… Continue reading Thirteen at Dinner (1985)
Ten Canoes (2009)
Yolngu Goose-eggs Sometimes all you need is magic. At least it seems so, when you see the real thing. If you happened to see Baz Luhmann’s ‘Australia’ and was confused, see this instead. It is the genuine article, about the magic, told with magic. It is circular, nested and webbed. It floats, and if you… Continue reading Ten Canoes (2009)
Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Books, Binding Sidney Pollack recently died, and I dredged this up to watch. It is a strange relic of a time when we really liked these spy stories — and the stories were allowed to be simple. The characters had no life outside the confined story. The story dynamics are simple, the migration of the… Continue reading Three Days of the Condor (1975)
Duel at Diablo (1966)
Old Paint It is absolutely amazing to me how badly a movie can age. I saw this one in the theatres when new. I remember thinking it was acceptable at the time. There was an actress that I knew from Bergman. There was the surprise of the Indian baby, which I saw in the segregated… Continue reading Duel at Diablo (1966)
Happy Feet (2006)
Mad Maximum Motion You can parse this into three bits I think. The first is what people normally see, the story. Miller and many of the Oz New Wave don’t pay much attention to this. They put something there of course, otherwise we would get distracted. Here it is an amazingly clever fold, referencing another… Continue reading Happy Feet (2006)