3 WOMEN / WARRIOR
In Which Olive Oyl and Carrie go Head to Head for the Sake of the Female Id, while an English lad and an Australian bloke re-enact the tortured soul of American masculinity, while Nick Nolte tries not to crumble, and Robert Altman smiles down from the heaven he didn’t believe in.
Episode 183 – RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES / WORLD ON A WIRE / THE KILLING
It’s almost too much action for one show Dear Listener: Gareth and I disagree more than a little bit on RISE OF THE PLAENT OF THE APES, cannot disagree for reasons that are obvious about Fassbinder’s WORLD ON A WIRE and explore a novel take on Stanley Kubrick’s THE KILLING.
The Greatest “Love at First Sight” Scene in the Movies
Yes, from the absurdly wonderful 1940 THIEF OF BAGDAD it’s The Greatest “Two People Fall in Love With Each Other Instantly Scene” in Movies.
Criterion Collection: PATHS OF GLORY and SEVEN SAMURAI
Hearing Stanley Kubrick’s voice on the new Criterion edition of his coruscating anti-war melodrama ‘Paths of Glory’ is like listening to a ghost; not because the director has been dead for over a decade, but because he said so little in public when he was alive. It’s one of the characteristic delights of a marvelous [...]
Bowie Knife
The first scene of Nagisa Oshima’s ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’ (new on DVD and Blu-Ray from Criterion) is occupied with the horror of a soldier being forced to cut his intestines open as a punishment for being in love with another man. The last image of the film is the smiling face of a soldier [...]
The Thin Red Line
Two films released by the Criterion Collection this week focus on men at war. We’ll discuss Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’ on the next episode, and below; later in the week I’ll post a piece on ‘Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence’. These are two of the most compelling films released on DVD this year. When [...]
Late Early Godard: MASCULIN FEMININ, LA CHINOISE, & WEEK END
Has any canonized auteur been met with such furious confusion as Jean-Luc Godard? Even well-studied Godardians disagree on his meanings and periods and politics. Which means there’s no way I’m going to “get” everything on my first viewing, so anxiety-free I finally completed Godard’s New Wave output. I haven’t seen them all in order (Made [...]
Coming soon to Blu-Ray: Ingmar Bergman's The Magician
Ingmar Bergman’s 1958 film The Magician (Ansiktet) is one of the director’s lesser known works. Yet for me, it’s Bergman at his absolute best — an illusive, atmospheric, soulful shadow-show on skepticism and spirituality. On October 12th, the film will be released by Criterion on Blu-Ray and dvd for the first time on either format. [...]
Slow-burning Americana Report: 'Mystery Train' from Criterion
Small town America may rightly fear that it has been overfilmed; certainly after watching Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Mystery Train’, one imagines that it would be difficult to show anything new that isn’t already telegraphed from or curled up inside this vision of Memphis. What a gorgeous, beguiling film – beginning with the incongruous image of a [...]
Summer Hours
Jeremie Renier, Juliette Binoche, and Charles Berling, looking happier than they often feel in ‘Summer Hours’ The premise that underlines Olivier Assayas’ film ‘Summer Hours’ couldn’t be more unfamiliar: elderly matriarch dies, her three adult children have to decide how to split up her estate, the Musee D’Orsay gets involved because said estate includes a [...]
TFT DVD/Digital Media/Miscellaneous Delivery Report: Kurosawa Birthday
It’s Akira Kurosawa’s 100th birthday – and to mark the occasion our next episode will feature a discussion with your genial co-hosts about ‘Yojimbo’, what may be his most entertaining film. I took a look at the new Criterion Blu-Ray at the weekend (it’s released today, along with its companion piece ‘Sanjuro’), and was instantly [...]
Downhill Racer: Winning Is Everything
Caught up with Criterion’s characteristically excellent release of ‘Downhill Racer‘, another film that reveals Michael Ritchie as an under-appreciated director (Honeslty, imdb-chatters, have you really nothing to say about the guy who made ‘The Candidate’, ‘Fletch’, and the deeply serious thriller ‘Prime Cut’?), Robert Redford as a far more nuanced actor than his reputation permits, [...]
Blue Light, Red Light: Paris, Texas and the Redemption of a Man
* Note: This post is so full of spoilers it’s almost ridiculous – so only read the first paragraph if you haven’t seen the film yet. It’s also more of a personal review than I might otherwise write, mostly because ‘Paris, Texas’ has been resonating deeply with me since I first saw it about 15 [...]
Jett Loe's Patented 'Worthwhile Web Wednesdays'
Ok, so Gareth got all webby with his post yesterday: The Tuesday Top Five: Anthropomorphic Animals in the Cinema Zoo I say ‘webby’ cause it’s well known that having posts containing numbered lists, such as a Top 5, or ones tied to days of the week, such as Twitter’s Follow Friday, are a quick way [...]
Is it Wrong to be too Scared to See Paranormal Activity?
So I was up early this morning having slept restlessly after watching the end of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ last night (no spoilers – suffice it to say that fans of Richard Dawkins and Thomas Merton may find themselves both satisfied; I certainly was). Cylons colonised my repose (for some reason the early models, one of whose [...]
Monsoon Wedding: 'There's a temple right in the middle of the driveway'
The good folks at the Criterion Collection have set a new standard for themselves with their edition of Mira Nair’s 2001 ‘Monsoon Wedding’, out today, and, if it wasn’t for the fact that they’re giving us ‘Wings of Desire’ in a couple of weeks, it would be my choice for simply the best DVD release [...]
