castle of illusion

Christopher Orr, The New Republic: 'Blindness'

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:46:52 -0300

Christopher Orr, The New Republic: 'Blindness': Indeed, the medium of film itself seems almost singularly unsuited to Saramago’s fable. Early in the novel, a character describes the white blindness as like “fall[ing] into a milky sea,” an impression reinforced by the author’s own studiously vague prose—the sentences that run on for lines, the paragraphs that run on for pages, the dearth of quotation marks and other punctuation. Meireilles might have attempted some comparable visual motif but, let’s face it, few people want to watch an out-of-focus movie for two hours. So, apart from the occasional showy fade to white, he and cinematographer César Charlone present the story like a hyper-vivid dream. (The repeated Hitchcockian close-ups on a pair of dangling scissors are so overdetermined that one half expects the scissors to leap down and stab someone by themselves.) This is the exceedingly rare film that could use less showing and more telling.

A. O. Scott: Blindness - The New York Times

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 06:26:23 -0300

A. O. Scott: Blindness - The New York Times: [T]he characters in Mr. Meirelles’s film may be ciphers, as they are in the mechanical universe of Mr. Saramago’s novel, but they are also Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga and the rest of those names listed in parentheses above. And this simple fact makes a big difference. Mr. Saramago’s lofty, ideologically defended humanism has no place for actual human beings, but actors of this caliber don’t know how to be anything else. Ms. Moore’s pale, fine-boned face is too precise and delicate an instrument to obey the rather simplistic directives of the story, and the rest of the cast shares her inability to sacrifice physical or psychological nuance in the service of vague ideas.

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,There’d Be a Whole Lot...

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:42:35 -0300

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,
There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats: Seminal Image #866

Zelly and Me

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:41:55 -0300

Zelly and Me

The start of something beautiful: Almost everyone quit the...

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:33:20 -0300

The start of something beautiful: Almost everyone quit the filming of Badlands, but those who stayed behind found they had made an American classic. Ryan Gilbey on the debut of the brilliant, perverse director Terrence Malick (via Ryan Gilbey on the making of American classic Badlands | Film | The Guardian)

Bloody torture and bloodier death from cops and thugs ensue amid...

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:04:48 -0300

Bloody torture and bloodier death from cops and thugs ensue amid smeary, jittery camerawork and choppy edits that transform the visually disjointed, grim and dim spaces into confetti. Somewhere, Roger Corman is weeping. (via Elite Squad - Movie - Review - The New York Times)

Jonathan Lethem on "The Dark Knight" (a couple of months too late, alas)

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:14:49 -0300

Jonathan Lethem on "The Dark Knight" (a couple of months too late, alas): In these déjà vu battles, the combatants forever escape one another’s final judgment, whirl off into the void, leaving us standing awed in the rubble, uncertain of what we’ve seen, only sure we’re primed for the sequel. If everything is broken, perhaps it is because for the moment we like it better that way. Unlike some others, I have no theory who Batman is — but the Joker is us.

How the West Was Won comes to DVD

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:32:49 -0300

How the West Was Won comes to DVD

Pauline Kael on Days of Heaven Terrence Malick wrote and...

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:22:00 -0300

Pauline Kael on Days of Heaven

Terrence Malick wrote and directed this story of adultery, set principally in the wheat fields of the Texas Panhandle just before America entered the First World War. It’s both a nostalgic and an anti-nostalgic vision of the American past. The landscapes are vast and lonely, with the space in the images strained and the figures tilted; the characters are monosyllabic-near-mute. What is unspoken in this picture weighs heavily on us, but we’re not quite sure what it is. The film is an empty Christmas tree: you can hang all your dumb metaphors on it. Richard Gere plays Bill, who works in a blast furnace in Chicago; he gets into a brawl with the foreman and heads south, taking his girl, Abby (Brooke Adams), and his 12-year-old sister, Linda (Linda Manz), with him. They find work in the fields of a wealthy young farmer (Sam Shepard), who falls in love with Abby. When Bill learns that the farmer may be dying, he encourages Abby to marry him-so that she can soon be a rich widow. The movie is oblique, except for the narration, which is by Linda; she’s a little-girl wise guy, and all the humor in the film comes from her laconic remarks, but she’s also precociously full of the wisdom of the ages, and at times her illiterate poetry is drenched in wistfulness and heartbreak. Shot by Nestor Almendros, with additional photography by Haskell Wexler, the film is a series of pictorial effects-some of them, such as a train passing over a lacework bridge, extraordinary-but the overpowering images seem unrelated, pieced together. The movie suffers from too many touches, too many ideas that don’t grow out of anything organic. It’s an epic pastiche. Though the irregularly handsome, slightly snaggletoothed Shepard has almost no lines, he makes a strong impression; he seems authentically an American of an earlier era. But Gere, with his post-50s acting style and the associations it carries of Brando and Dean and Clift and all the others who shrugged and scowled and acted with their shoulders, is anachronistic.

Pauline Kael on Empire of the Sun At the outset, this Steven...

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:14:45 -0300

Pauline Kael on Empire of the Sun

At the outset, this Steven Spielberg epic is so big and majestic you want to laugh in pleasure, and it stays that way for about 45 minutes-Spielberg takes over Shanghai, and makes it his city. But then, first in brief patches and then in longer ones, his directing goes terribly wrong. The story, taken from J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novel, is set at the outbreak of the Second World War, and it’s about Jim (Christian Bale), an 11-year-old British schoolboy, who is separated from his parents when the Japanese Army invades the city, on December 8, 1941, and how he changes in order to survive three years of starving in a prison camp. It isn’t told straightforwardly, though. Spielberg throws himself into bravura passages, lingers over them trying to give them a poetic obsessiveness, and loses his grasp of the narrative. For the sake of emotion-to have something to say, to give the picture some meaning-he pumps it full of false emotion. (That’s what his poetry is.) The picture is a combination of craftsmanship and almost unbelievable tastelessness. Every time Spielberg tries to make a humanitarian statement, he falls flat on his face-not just because his statements are so naïve but because they go against the grain of Ballard’s material. John Williams’ editorializing music swells and swooshes, trying to make you feel that something religious is going on. Christian Bale is a fine performer, directed superlatively; also with John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, Nigel Havers, and Joe Pantoliano. The adaptation is credited to Tom Stoppard (it was also worked on by Menno Meyjes); the cinematography is by Allen Daviau. Spielberg had permission to shoot in Shanghai for only three weeks; the settings were matched up and constructed in Spain and London.

What Nixon Saw and When He Saw It by Mark Feeney

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:57:58 -0300

What Nixon Saw and When He Saw It by Mark Feeney: Nixon watched movies like a madman.

JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Figuring Out DAY OF WRATH

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 01:39:40 -0300

JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog Archive » Figuring Out DAY OF WRATH: If a direct political allegory would have entailed a distortion of the historical truth as well as a serious risk for the filmmakers, there’s another conscious or unconscious route that might have been taken by Dreyer and the other creative participants on the film that is worth considering. In most of the more honest depictions of totalitarian societies that have been made, consciously or unconsciously, by people living inside them, one can find a fairly systematic displacement of the theme of political enslavement and persecution to the theme of sexual enslavement and persecution.

"An industry that seems to have concluded that its best hope is to dramatize the comic-strip..."

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 15:43:30 -0300

“An industry that seems to have concluded that its best hope is to dramatize the comic-strip literature of an earlier and more vigorous era is one whose fevers have finally destroyed its nerve. With rare exceptions the pictures coming out of Hollywood today are the last resorts of the gutless.”

- Larry McMurtry, foreword to “Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood” (Simon and Schuster, 1987)

The Auteurs’ Notebook » Acquarello on “Vampyr” (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932)

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 20:09:00 -0300

The Auteurs’ Notebook » Acquarello on “Vampyr” (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932):

…while Vampyr would seem an aberration in Dreyer’s body of work in its darker themes of occultism and the undead - and especially within the context of a “religious director” label usually attached to him - it is a film that, nevertheless, closely embodies his realization of personal filmmaking.

Set in an otherworldly landscape of autonomous shadows, ghostly apparitions, and wandering, lost souls that may or may not be the figment of a fanciful passing stranger, Allen Gray’s imagination, Vampyr also articulates Dreyer’s recurring themes of sacrifice, unreconciled death, and transfiguration - themes that, in a way, reflect his own personal demons …

Using fractured, often mismatched cuts, and a transection of the space between shadow and light to create an atmosphere of imbalance and dislocation, Dreyer also suggests shifting points of view and an inconcreteness of place that reinforce the viewer’s consciousness of the film’s construction and permeable logic. In essence, by cultivating an awareness of seeing a fictional construction, Dreyer evokes the spirit of Georges Méliès in the idea that cinema is simultaneously an act of conjuring and the art of the spectacle - for which the most spectacular act lies in the conjuring of the dead.

vadim023.jpg (image)

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 20:06:50 -0300

vadim023.jpg (image)

Here’s just what you’ve been craving: Twelve minutes...

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 11:28:41 -0300

Here’s just what you’ve been craving: Twelve minutes and 19 seconds of stopping, starting, slowing down and gabbing (I mean, breathless commentary) over the one-minute, 47-second title sequence that introduces each episode of the cult-classic 1967-68 British science-fiction / spy TV series, “The Prisoner,” starring Patrick McGoohan. (via “We want information!” The Arrival of The Prisoner - scanners)

The Swimmer might be the Perrys’ best remembered film today, but...

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:50:57 -0300

The Swimmer might be the Perrys’ best remembered film today, but it presents a difficult case for study, chiefly because it’s hard to tell where Frank Perry’s work ends and Sydney Pollack’s (and possibly even others’) begins. Perry once speculated that about 50 percent of the film wasn’t his. (via Domestic Disturbances by Bilge Ebiri - Moving Image Source)

"Calculus does come in handy, at least when you’re reading Christopher Priest."

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:43:27 -0300

“Calculus does come in handy, at least when you’re reading Christopher Priest.”

- Jessica Crispin - An Intensely Imagined Future In ‘Inverted World’ : NPR

"Christopher Nolan showed himself a clever director in Memento and a promising one in The Prestige...."

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:47:54 -0300

“Christopher Nolan showed himself a clever director in Memento and a promising one in The Prestige. So how did he manage to make The Dark Knight such a portentously hollow movie? Apart from enjoying seeing Hong Kong in Imax, I was struck by the repetition of gimmicky situations–disguises, hostage-taking, ticking bombs, characters dangling over a skyscraper abyss, who’s dead really once and for all? The fights and chases were as unintelligible as most such sequences are nowadays, and the usual roaming-camera formulas were applied without much variety. Shoot lots of singles, track slowly in on everybody who’s speaking, spin a circle around characters now and then, and transition to a new scene with a quick airborne shot of a cityscape. Like Jim Emerson, I thought that everything hurtled along at the same aggressive pace. If I want an arch-criminal caper aiming for shock, emotional distress, and political comment, I’ll take Benny Chan’s New Police Story.”

- David Bordwell - Observations on film art and FILM ART : Superheroes for sale

Amazon.com: On Film (Thinking in Action): Stephen Mulhall:...

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:56:48 -0300

Amazon.com: On Film (Thinking in Action): Stephen Mulhall: Books

Roy’s association of slavery with living in fear, thus echoing Leon’s earlier perception, also reminds us of the replicant’s perception of their own status in relation to their human creators; in part, his lesson is intended to teach Deckard what he, along with all human beings, is responsible for doing to the replicants — what his denial of their humanity amounts to. But most fundamentally, it is designed to teach Deckard a lesson about his own relation to death — about his mortality. Roy brings it about that Deckard feels that every moment may be his last, and Deckard’s response is to flee from this threat; he functions at the level of an injured animal, incapable of anything more than an unthinking attempt to avoid the threat of extinction. His pursuer, by contrast — who knows that his own death is imminent, whether by genetic determinism or by Deckard’s own efforts with gun and crowbar — responds to the threat by running towards it. He toys with the very threat that paralyses Deckard; he sees that, since mortality is internal to human existence and embodiment, genuine humanity turns on finding the right reaction to it.

We are thereby given inauthentic and authentic ways of living a human life in the face of its mortality. Deckard’s flight denies the ubiquity of this threat — as if an escape from Roy would amount to an escape from the threat he incarnates. Roy treats the same threat playfully. …

Like Zarathustra’s disciples, Roy is dancing on the edge of the abyss, performing his version of Pris’ cartwheeling enactment of her thinking, embodied existence (in Sebastian’s apartment). The lightness and grace of his life finds confirmation in his ability to look at death, and the death of love, without fear or hysteria. And he wants to teach this to Deckard: if to play is to be fully alive, not to play is to be reduced to death-in-life or merely animal existence. If you can’t play, you might as well be dead.