Theme: Film

The chance entrance to the city before it disappeared. Thoughts hanging like bodies from ropes. The image seems to have been taken from inside a moving car, but this is staged. The windshield wipers are props. The highway is front-projection.Read more

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Last week I emailed Laurie Penny's article "Steubenville: This is rape culture's Abu Ghraib moment" to my mother. We talked about it. She called it "sexual fascism." She always has the right words. I asked her how it is possible to raise human beings who are capable of things like this. I use the word "human" loosely here. Human, first and foremost, may not even be the point, as evidenced by the media’s and the public’s response to the rape.Read more

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A silent comedy by René Clair.Read more

Kerouac was susceptible to film—a sucker for its promise of riches as well as its flickering poetry—and he imagined an iconic adaptation of On the Road. Not long after the book’s publication, in September 1957, he wrote to Marlon Brando asking him to buy the book and get it made:Read more

1. John Barrowman. 2. All-too pertinent news clips are shown in the background of two discussion scenes. 3. Music I listen to for pleasure being used for pain. (I know this happened IRL, but nonetheless.)Read more

Ernest Hemingway on filmRead more

A friend of mine in his mid-twenties is a Film Studies graduate, and like a typical old person – both somewhat right and very annoying – I’m always mentioning old movies to him, being surprised he hasn’t seen them, and pointing out earlier connections to films he has seen, as if he can’t really know a film properly without knowing what came before. Read more

The new, old Rolling Stones film, “Charlie Is My Darling,” played at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre this past weekend, and we joined a mellow crowd of folks carrying beers and popcorn into the main auditorium, most of us probably able to claim that we had been raised on the Stones.Read more

The frame is blood-soaked by the invisible hand of the one who watches over the video. Detached from the flow of images that make up “Carmen,” the video frame serves as an omen revealing—for an instant—that this is not just another music video, but rather a horror film.Read more

For a long time it was all about the camera. The truths it presented and the truths it covered up. We knew the camera lied, but we also believed it told the truth. Now we know it only does the former, only we don’t care anymore. As a kid, I had a crush on the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein because I saw All The President’s Men on TV and thought he was Dustin Hoffman. I believed what I was seeing.Read more

The below screen shot is from Andrew McCarthy's new book, The Longest Way Home. I've written a lot about Pretty in Pink, so it was interesting to see McCarthy read from his memoir at McNally Jackson Books back in September. Because of the way he acted, talked. Read more

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In his book on French thought, Ethics – Politics – Subjectivity, philosopher Simon Critchley cites the passage above in relation to the processes inherent in silent comedy. Harpo is a mute fool and, as such, ironically has the power of ultimate speech. Like a child who knows no better, we forgive him his indiscretions and laugh at the discomfort we feel when he surprises us with his inappropriate behaviour Read more

I've appreciated Aleksandr Sokurov since the 1990s, but it was, I think, with his 2003 Father and Son that he first began to seem genuinely puzzling to me. This film, not at all Turgenevian, portrayed two men apparently of the same age, posing in various intimate positions with one another, always in the middle of meticulously composed and painterly scenes.Read more

In a deleted take from The Wizard of Oz posted on YouTube, Judy/Dorothy breaks down during her iconic song. She doesn't sing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow," she weeps it. Did they want her to cry like this? Did they push her too hard, for too long, for too many years? Or did her crying overtake her and "ruin" the take?Read more

An animated short film directed by Chuck Jones and narrated by Robert Morley. The Dot and the Line is based on a book of the same name, written and illustrated by Norton Juster, which was inspired by the 1884 novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott.Read more