“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.” – Captain Geoffrey T. Spaulding (Groucho Marx) Animal Crackers, the second feature starring the Marx Brothers, released in 1930, is over eighty years old now, and it still leaves me hard-pressed to find many films that afford […]
Reviews
Pulling Focus: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
“On a daily basis I consume enough drugs to sedate Manhattan, Long Island, and Queens for a month. I take Quaaludes 10-15 times a day for my ‘back pain’, Adderall to stay focused, Xanax to take the edge off, pot to mellow me out, cocaine to wake me back up again, and morphine… Well, because […]
Pulling Focus: Chinatown (1974)
“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” – Lawrence Walsh (played by Joe Manetell) Darkness on the edge of town A neo-noir masterpiece, Chinatown proves that director Roman Polanski, screenwriter Robert Towne, and producer Robert Evans can make a monumental film wherein they beat a genre until it’s a bloody, swollen, purple-bruised, and marred mess, then […]
Pulling Focus: Fantastic Planet (1973)
“Cinema is showing more and more. It’s a paranoid, dictatorial cinema. And it’s saying less and less. We need a schizophrenic cinema.” – René Laloux And now we wonder where we are Will there ever be another full-length animated feature quite as wonderfully weird and endlessly imaginative as René Laloux’s underground French classic Fantastic […]
Pulling Focus: Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)
“Céline and Julie Go Boating is a do it yourself guide to rediscovering the delights of the street outside, and of the idiots all around you, here’s where we see Rivette first moving toward Shakespeare, and the world as all fools’ paradise.” – David Phelps Usually it began like this Playfully reflecting silent-era idiosyncrasy […]
Tati’s Hulot Films: The Struggle of the Organic Soul in an Inorganic World
In the hands of the masters, no form of dramatic expression is more powerful than comedy. The cliché that all comedy is born of tragedy is no exaggeration. Laughter is the strongest defense against what can often seem a terribly cruel and unjust world. At its best, humor laughs at the same moment it commiserates […]