HEARTBEATS: Don’t you want me, baby?
HEARTBEATS is like Godard directing the kind of mad love music video the ‘80s were rife with (“Don’t You Want Me,” “Every Breath You Take,” “There is a Light That Never Goes Out,” etc.) where the bouncy electronic pop doesn’t come close to obscuring the dark edge that underscores passionate love
ANOTHER YEAR: Seasonal Affective Disorder
While THE KING’S SPEECH loudly, laughably declared it has a voice this weekend, sweeping the guild awards and hoodwinking a lot of people who should know better into thinking it’s more than a shallow, concave, lumpy golddigger, ANOTHER YEAR quietly expanded, a genuinely humanist portrait of middle-aged British people discovering the therapeutic power of friendship, [...]
A Slasher Halloween: CALIGARI, THE LEOPARD MAN, & HOUSE OF WAX
I know, I know, Halloween’s over and you’re all ready to start celebrating Election Day or Guy Fawkes Day or The Holiday Formerly Known as Armistice Day or something, but I could hardly have told you how I spent my Halloween before Halloween. So, without further ado, brief thoughts on the evolution of the film [...]
Violence and Sentimentality in the Movies: A Dangerous Pair?
Richard Brody at The Front Row has this interesting reflection on violence and the movies/media in general: “There does seem to be a great deal of research on the question of violence and of quantity of viewing; but very little, if any, on the subject of treacle. I do worry about the effect of violent [...]
Gareth Goes Home: 'Turning Green' mixes him up
You know, we like to be friendly round here, but if you’ve been in the The Film Talk neighbourhood for any length of time, you’ll also know that we often grieve the lack of imagination in most films. Robots kill some people/people kill more robots; abs-ridden guy meets cute girl/conflict/unification; bloke changes, you know the [...]
The Tuesday Top Five: Anthropomorphic Animals in the Cinema Zoo
Chaos Indeed One of the questionable delights of Lars von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’, which we still haven’t seen at The Film Talk due to those oh-so-frustrating regional distribution patterns, is the appearance of a demonic fox who enlightens the audience with the motto: ‘Chaos Reigns’. And so it does, in Trier’s universe, this time round (you [...]
Mental Illness and the Movies
Just a brief post from me as I’m on my way to Nashville to, among other things, meet up with the maestro for a screening of recent cult film ‘The Room’ at the glorious Belcourt Theatre. Meantime, I’d like to recommend the gutsy article at the Huffington Post from Glenn Close on the cinematic portrayal [...]
'Unforgiven' and the Roots of Violence
I took another look at ‘Unforgiven‘ the other day – one of those films whose original impact was muted by the fact that I saw it amidst hype, and, precisely half a lifetime ago, when I didn’t know that I had no idea what I was talking about. The difference today, I suppose is twofold; [...]
Film and Madness
‘Vertigo’s Mad Passion: But Who is He Trying to Save? Fascinating long article-in-progress at GreenCine Daily by the wonderfully named Simon Augustine on portrayals of the edges of sanity in the movies; particularly provocative on the question of how our own projected desires become intertwined with the cinematic image: “Think about how a film works [...]
