By most accounts, Julie Buck has established a successful career. After years of schooling, she’s now working at Harvard University’s Film Archives preserving materials on the verge of utter extinction. But it’s what she’s most widely known for — her work preserving and presenting vintage porn — that has made her career a taboo subject […]
Movies
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No signs of life in another wooden Woody
In the halcyon days of the past, a new Woody Allen movie generated excitement in the hearts of countless viewers, especially hip urbanites, who believed the writer-director spoke to them in their language, addressing the seriocomic neuroses of their time and place. A generation and some 30 films later, many of them simply repeating with […]
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Lessons in the lost art of subtlety
The best actor prize at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival didn’t go to an international critics’ darling like Javier Bardem or Gael Garcia Bernal but to a 14-year-old boy named Yagira Yuya. His subtle, heartbreaking performance anchors Nobody Knows, the latest film by talented Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda. Inspired by events that occurred in late […]
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City’s choice: film
In 1990, the Motion Picture Association of America invented the NC-17 rating to slap on Henry & June (Saturday, April 16, Dryden Theatre, 8 p.m., 271-4090, $6), Philip Kaufman’s look at the stormy and steamy relationship between writers Anais Nin and Henry Miller and their muse, Henry’s wife June. Not explicit enough for an X […]
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Suburban agony, bourgeois melodrama
Film distributors often fill the odd intermezzo between the late-year Oscar shoehorning and the explosive appearance of those sure harbingers of warm weather, the blockbuster action flicks, with some small, sometimes unclassifiable pictures. The late winter dumping time may explain the considerable quantity of favorable publicity surrounding Mike Binder’s new picture, The Upside of Anger. […]
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A letter to the queen: I hate to say I told you so
Dear Queen Latifah, Have I turned into some sort of Tinseltown power broker? About a month ago I mentioned in this space that I would like to see Djimon Hounsou (In America, Constantine) as the love interest in a romantic comedy, and now we’ve got Beauty Shop! I can’t help but conclude that you saw […]
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You gotta have faith. And bullets.
I was asked recently what I believed in. I replied that I believed in believing — not in any kind of structured religious way, but absolute faith in yourself and your choices, as well as an unbending belief in the inherent good of others. It’s been my observation that only two varieties of people operate […]
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City’s choice: film
Harry Knuckles and the Pearl Necklace is about… umm… well, it’s about two hours long, and… uhh… Bigfoot is in it, and… oh, it’s got lesbian cannibals and nuns with breakaway habits, and… hmm… it defies description, really. Harry Knuckles (Phil Caracas), an aptly named superspy, and his Mexican wrestler sidekick El Santos are on […]
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What a difference a generation makes
Anyone who doubts the famous maxim attributed to Karl Marx (or perhaps his cousin Groucho) that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, need only take a look at the new movie Guess Who. In its updating of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner of 1967, the film demonstrates that a comparable Marxist pattern […]
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Around and around ‘The Ring’
The curious history of The Ring Two provides an appropriate lesson in the globalization of what at one time seemed a largely American approach to film. The mere fact of the picture’s appearance may reassure those students of international cinema who deplore the American habit of repetition and self-imitation, the endless spinning of remakes and […]
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Ignorance takes a holiday
Schultze, Manfred, and Jürgen sit around a table with their new retirement gifts — atrocious lamps described as both “nice” and “salty.” In the days that follow this early departure from the working world, these three buddies will settle into their daily routine of fishing, quaffing, bickering, and, in the cases of Manfred and Jürgen, […]
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One life-changing summer in the desert
Now and then, despite the blockbusters that thunder through the megaplexes and their accompanying bluster and ballyhoo, amid the hype and hypocrisy of the advertisers and reviewers (sometimes the same entities), a solid, modest, little motion picture threads its way through the thickets of hyperbole and navigates the rivers of gush to arrive at a […]
