Posts Tagged ‘Pulling Focus’
“Relationships were all [John Cassavetes] was interested in: the laughter and the games, the tears and the guilt, the whole roller coaster of love.” – Martin Scorsese At long last love To my mind there’s something mythic and altogether magical about Love Streams, John Cassavetes’ momentous and penultimate picture from 1984. For the past twenty years or so I’ve… Read more »
“The best British comedy ever made? Possibly. A masterpiece? Unquestionably.” – Ali Catterall, Film4 Where I’m calling from From the tender and impassioned sound of King Curtis’ live recorded cover of Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” in the opening scene to the finishing drizzly goodbye by the wolf enclosure in Regent’s Park, Withnail and I is a… Read more »
“[Dead Man] is the Western Andrei Tarkovsky wanted to make.” – J. Hoberman The Place of Dead Roads Ohio-born Indie auteur Jim Jarmusch refurbishes the black-and-white Western the way a 19th century Native American might see it––as a murderous and genocidal head trip heralding the deadly homecoming of capitalism. Woven into the light threads of this gossamer nightmare is… Read more »
“I respect my audience, and I assume they come to the theatre with a certain level of intelligence, but I don’t pander to them. I feel like, ‘Look, I’m going to take you somewhere, you can go or not go, but here is where we’re going’. I like that attitude when I see movies.” – Steven Soderbergh The stars… Read more »
“One of the most polarizing movies in recent years.” – Richard Roeper Stranger in a strange land Geometric circular shapes coalesce and converge in an abstract play of light and gloom, almost like a constellation or the orbital trajectory of planets, until, looming large, a sinister eye seems to burst into being, staring directly at us, the audience, or,… Read more »
“Maybe I’m sick, but I want to see that again.” – Pauline Kael It’s a strange world, isn’t it? Feigned amidst the well-manicured lawns and white-picket fences of small-town America breathes David Lynch’s darkly disturbing Blue Velvet. Shaken by a quickening dream logic and the upsetting affections of a bad-tempered film noir from the Decade of Conformity, the 1950s,… Read more »
“I’m watching [Chungking Express] and all of a sudden I start crying –– tears started falling, about three different times during the movie. I was like, why am I crying? And it’s because my feelings for this movie run so deep –– I’m crying not about the movie, I’m crying because I’m just so happy to love a movie this… Read more »
“Halloween is an absolutely merciless thriller, a movie so violent and scary that, yes, I would compare it to Psycho. It’s a terrifying and creepy film about what one of the characters calls Evil Personified… Halloween is a visceral experience––we aren’t seeing the movie, we’re having it happen to us.” – Roger Ebert Baby take my hand, don’t fear… Read more »
“No one makes movies like [Cronenberg].” – Martin Scorsese Long live the new flesh! Part aphrodisiac and part body horror hallucination, Videodrome is a sensual, shocking, and scary tour de force from Canadian iconoclast David Cronenberg. Embellishing and protracting his persistent interests in viral transference and the body as a collective and biological theater of war, Videodrome is Cronenberg’s… Read more »
“Carrie effortlessly straddles, and frequently blurs, the line between exploitation trash and serious-minded cinema” – Paul O’Callaghan, BFI They’re all gonna laugh at you! Following after the minor successes of Sisters (1973), Phantom of the Paradise (1974)––which would eventually have a substantial cult following––and Obsession (1976), Carrie would prove, once and for all, that Brian De Palma could not… Read more »
“Death is not the worst. There are things more horrible than death.” – Count Dracula (played by Klaus Kinski) Blood on your cool Pronounced and menacing, Werner Herzog’s redaction of Nosferatu should not be viewed, as he insists, as a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 horror classic of German silent cinema––what Herzog describes as “the greatest German film,”––but what’s… Read more »
“They Live is one of the best films of a fine American director.” – Martin Scorsese California Über Alles In 1985 or thereabouts, around the time John Carpenter was taking a detour from his exploitation horror films to do the more family-friendly live-action cartoon Big Trouble in Little China, “The Master of Horror”––as he is often affectionately referred to––came… Read more »
Take a chance on me Peter Sellers’ sans pareil performance – also his penultimate – as Chance, the gardener, idiot savant exemplar, is a disarmingly taciturn portrait, and the discerning centerpiece of Hal Ashby’s oft omitted masterpiece from 1979, Being There. Ashby directed several seminal pictures throughout the 1970s, including such substantial works as Harold and Maude (1971), The Last… Read more »
Are you one of those single tear people? I saw Whiplash for the first time at the 2014 Vancouver International Film Festival, in a packed house with director Damien Chazelle in attendance. I’d heard rumblings of distant thunder about the film earlier that year when it took Sundance by storm, and where it was dubbed “Full Metal Jacket at Julliard’… Read more »
“Johnny Guitar is surely one of the most blatant psychosexual melodramas ever to disguise itself in that most commodious of genres, the Western.” – Roger Ebert Anyone can play guitar “I’m gonna kill you,” spits a venomous Emma Small, played with evil élan by Mercedes McCambridge, to the legendary Joan Crawford (Forsaking All Others, Mildred Pierce) as Vienna—in a… Read more »
“Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves is a genuinely spiritual movie that asks ‘what is love and what is compassion?’” – Martin Scorsese In a broken dream Set in remote North-West Scotland’s Outer Hebrides of the 1970s is the ill-at-ease and heart-rending romance of Lars von Trier’s paralyzing (and, alas, polarizing) melodrama, Breaking the Waves. It is here that,… Read more »
