The motion picture projector not only unreels that famous ribbon of dreams, it also frequently unravels the tangled web of memory. The flashback, one of the most common and ancient devices of film narrative, after all, suggests the easy and immediate power of the cinema to reflect the process of recollection. A number of movies, […]
Movies
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City’s choice: movies
Vincent Gallo has attracted plenty of attention with his new film, The Brown Bunny, the follow-up to Buffalo ’66. Not one to leave his vision up to fate (or collaboration) — Gallo wrote, starred in, directed, edited, and composed the music for Bunny. It tells the story of Bud Clay (Gallo), a motorcycle racer riding […]
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The spectacle of the 1930s
The appearance of the highly publicized Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow suggests some of the peculiar problems troubling the familiar combination of the technology and the art of film. Ideally, of course, the two should meld seamlessly, supporting each other in the expression of subject and theme, but in the real world of […]
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Murder and mayhem equals quality — who knew?
For whatever reason, most of the best films I saw at the Toronto Film festival this year were also the creepiest. Les Revenants, a French film, tries out the zombie movie as an intellectual exercise. Well, zombies may be putting it a bit strongly, since the “returnees” (as the title puts it, though look for […]
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Can you hear me now?
The technothriller, which manifests itself mostly in science fiction and the great action blockbusters, nicely suits both the style and content of an era dominated by mechanism and ingenuity. Such films both feed and stimulate the appetite of an apparently insatiable audience for ever great quantities of shootouts, fireworks, car chases, and assorted metamorphoses, all […]
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All the sex films are in Toronto
Toronto’s economy suffered a blow this week with the first half of the Toronto Film festival. Sales of pay-per-view porn declined dramatically in hotel rooms as visiting press and industry delegates were treated gratis to a never-ending flow of explicit sex on the festival screens. Okay, just kidding, but there was quite a lot of […]
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Watching the wealthy at play
Although William Makepeace Thackeray called Vanity Fair “a novel without a hero,” the makers of the famous motion picture of 1935 entitled their film Becky Sharp. They named it after the book’s major character, who provides a central focus, the protagonist if not the heroine of the vast, sprawling work. In Mira Nair’s new adaptation, […]
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Also playing…
While the principles of art and warfare might appear to share little common ground, one could argue that the most sophisticated examples of both do use at least one radically similar technique. The “indirect approach,” (later called Fabian Tactics), first put to use by the great Theban General Epaminondas to defeat the indomitable Spartans, has […]
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Serial killer of serial killers
The important connection between the detective and his quarry, a staple of the mystery story since Poe, undergoes a peculiar metamorphosis in our time. Based on the evidence of both history and headlines, the serial killer is the culprit of choice these days, supplanting such quaint figures of the past as the safecracker, the jewel […]
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Back to the origins of evil
When William Friedkin’s adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel, The Exorcist, first appeared in 1973, it immediately established itself as a classic, opening up a new area of exploration for the horror flick and exerting a powerful influence on the genre. Stressing the religious component in horror, only vaguely touched upon in the past, the […]
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Also playing…
Unpleasant and bewildering in a way that seems somehow unfortunately worthwhile, Animal Love is like the grimy flipside of a warm and fuzzy Animal Planet show. Austrian director Ulrich Siedl lobbed this into the squirming public’s lap all the way back in 1995, but it’s just now finding its premiere in Rochester (maybe being banned […]
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Also playing… tonight, on a very special film
Back in the ’80s, at the last game the New York Jets played at Shea Stadium before moving to the Meadowlands in New Jersey, a frustrated fan held up a sign that read, “Jersey Smells.” The much-maligned state of New Jersey is used to such insincere criticism. First-time writer-director Zach Braff, made semi-famous by the […]
