Some filmmakers apparently forget the elementary and obvious fact that their medium originated in nonverbal narratives and flourished in silence long before the introduction of spoken dialogue (which many critics and historians initially regarded as a retrogressive, rather than a progressive, step), and, therefore, film should always rely on its visual possibilities. Whatever its merits, […]
George Grella
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A voyage through Italian cinema
Ah, there’s where I left my sense of decency: A scene from ‘Salò or The 120 Days of Sodom.’ The administrators of the film program entitled “Your Voyage to Italy” — at the George Eastman House’s Dryden Theatre this month and next — could scarcely have chosen two more distinctive works to initiate the series. […]
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Don’t be afraid of Virginia Woolf
In Virginia Woolf’s first book, The Voyage Out, a character expresses the desire to write a novel about all the things that people don’t say, an ambition that the author herself fulfilled in a later book entitled The Waves. Steadfastly devoted to that interior life and those unspoken thoughts and feelings, inclined to close observation […]
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An extraordinary, ordinary man
The opening sequences of his last two movies provide some proof that Jack Nicholson’s much discussed new maturity is not simply one of those inventions of the publicity folks and their accomplices in the entertainment media. Both The Pledge and About Schmidt introduce Nicholson’s character at a retirement party, thus indicating that unlike many Hollywood […]
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Alien body double
More than three decades ago, the television show Star Trek first chronicled the voyages of the starship Enterprise as it ventured through distant galaxies and strange seas of thought — “boldly going,” as the voice-over stated, “where no man had gone before.” Those journeys almost always included a confrontation with an alien species or civilization, […]
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Cinderella’s coach rolls again
If folklore, oral tradition, and the Brothers Grimm hadn’t transmitted the Cinderella tale down through the years, surely Hollywood would have invented it. Centuries of stories and generations of movies about a poor, but worthy, young woman who falls in love with a man of higher station, overcomes the obstacles of isolation and oppression, and […]
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The gangster and the psychiatrist
Analyze That, the sequel to the funny and successful Analyze This (1999) — the titles certainly display a nice logic — demonstrates a complicated and comical series of internal connections to both the fictions and the reality of that popular Hollywood subject, the Mafia. While most obviously referring back to its predecessor, the movie also […]
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Deep ideas in Solaris’ ocean world
Editor’s note: Thanks to a holiday scheduling snafu, we here present another review of Solaris. Yes, this does mean the film is extra good. Some students of science fiction prefer to call the genre speculative fiction, an appropriate term for works that can encourage responses of a greater complexity than the entertainment and escapism […]
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Bond’s returns, saves civilization again(yawn)
The appearance of Die Another Day demonstrates once again that after some 20 films, a handful of 007 impersonators, dozens of beautiful women, plots and situations that pretty much repeat themselves over and over, and a batch of recognizable conventions, the James Bond movies constitute a genre all their own. They influence the innumerable action-adventure […]
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Chamber Potter mixture as before
Wisely perceiving (and abhorring) a vacuum between Halloween and Thanksgiving, the producers of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets apparently decided to anticipate the holidays and kick off the season a trifle early. Since their movie will assuredly harvest many millions of dollars and will probably still be playing somewhere at Easter, the maneuver […]
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De Palma’s Femme Fatale just a ittle tease
Brian De Palma’s new film, Femme Fatale, begins in darkness, with the muffled but gradually recognizable voices of Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck speaking on the sound track. As light filters by degrees into the frame, the audience sees a television screen showing the climactic scene between the two lovers in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. […]
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I Spy with very little mind
The new action comedy I Spy provides some important services and teaches some valuable lessons to the student of contemporary cinema, especially the well-known Hollywood variety. To begin with, the movie’s marketers copied Winston Churchill’s World War II strategy of carpet bombing, opening the picture in what seems like every multiplex in the country, with […]
