Documentary Ethics, Economic Disparity, and LAST TRAIN HOME
The problem with many modern documentaries is that it’s hard to know what to think without more information on their production. Take for example The King of Kong, an exceedingly-entertaining glimpse at the battle for the Donkey Kong high-score whose ultra-simplistic David & Goliath story felt too good to be true. Turns out it may [...]
Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie and The American Dreamer
Maybe I misunderstood Joaquin Phoenix’s I’m Still Here when I called it an over-privileged aping of Andy Kaufman and Borat. (See my The Film Talk review here.) As I watched the 1971 documentary The American Dreamer — about Dennis Hopper and the making of his ill-fated The Last Movie – I had an epiphany. Phoenix [...]
THE SOCIAL NETWORK or How Facebook Caught My Girlfriend Cheating
In 2005, my college-aged friends introduced me to Myspace and Facebook. I quickly fell under Myspace’s spell, creating a personal and band page, taking way too many vanity self-portraits, and attempting to ‘friend’ as many quirky, cute girls that I could find in a 45 mile vicinity. I would have done the same with Facebook, [...]
Ticket for One – A Night at the Movies – By Yourself
If you’re like me, you often find yourself alone at the cinema ticket line. Try as you might, you just couldn’t sell your partner or your friends on the Jacques Tati retrospective or the 6 hour Hungarian black and white epic. Of course, your friends blamed a lack of cash, prior commitments, or a head [...]
I'm Still Here – A Brave, Miscalculated Mess
The problem with talking about I’m Still Here is that we have to discuss something you by all rights shouldn’t know when entering the theater. But every review you come across will pontificate on it. Odds are you already know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, stop here, and go watch the movie. Spoilers [...]
Leave Her to Heaven: Hollywood Chauvinism or Feminist Masterpiece?
To discuss John M. Stahl’s 40s Technicolor noir Leave Her to Heaven in any great detail would be to give too much away, and I don’t want to rob you of the film’s many pleasures. I’ll tell you this much: Fiction writer Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) meets the beautiful and mysterious Ellen Berent (Gene Tierney) [...]
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. [...]
See You Next Week – DragonCon awaits!
I’m typing this while sitting on my hotel room bed in sunny downtown Atlanta, preparing myself for four days of geek debauchery. For this is the weekend of Dragon*Con, the world’s largest culture convention — an everlasting gobstopper of science fiction, fantasy, film, television, literature, costuming, podcasting, science!, and more. And this is my Film [...]
Piranha 3D: Sloppy, Gory Fun.
A friend of mine accused my last article (Kick Ass & Why I Don’t Like Super Hero Movies) of elitism. As if. Snobbery maybe, but elitism? If I were truly a film elitist, I wouldn’t have enjoyed the skin & blood fest that is Piranha 3D. But for all its faults, I did.
KICK-ASS and Why I Don’t Like Superhero Movies
Yes, I know it’s been a while since Kick-Ass played the theaters. But I only just caught it on Blu-Ray, and it led me to think long and hard about superhero movies — thoughts I felt worth sharing with you. Here’s why I didn’t like Kick-Ass and why I generally don’t like superhero movies: As [...]
The 48 Hour Film Festival
In 2007, I made a film for the Nashville 48 Film Festival. If you’re not familiar with the fest, teams from around each city must write, shoot, and edit a 4-7 minute film in just 48 hours. The teams are given a line of dialogue, a prop, a character, and a hat-pulled genre. I’d like [...]
Thoughts on Winter's Bone
Winter’s Bone is by far and wide the best reviewed live action American film of the year (beat out on Metacritic only by the Ozu re-release I was Born, But. . ., the brilliant Un Prophete, and Toy Story 3.) The modern day Ozark noir has some of the best performances of recent memory, a [...]
7 Reasons You're Irrationally Clinging to Your DVD Collection
Over the past year, I’ve been gradually selling off my dvd collection on Ebay. Last Sunday, I listed the final stragglers. Once the auctions are paid for and shipped, I will be, in effect, dvd-less for the first time in 10 years. And that fills me with a mixture of loss and freedom. A dvd [...]
Another Brick in the Wall-E and other Movie/Music Mashups
In the late seventies, out of accident or curiosity, some unknown stoner put on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon while simultaneously watching a muted The Wizard of Oz. Thus begat music/film synchronicity. For The Dark Side of the Rainbow, the quality of effect is directly proportional to the amount of drugs you have [...]
Youngblood on Film: Kurosawa Centennial at the Belcourt Part 2
The Kurosawa Centennial continues at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, Tennessee. Here’s the second part of my preview of the retrospective. (Part one here.)
Youngblood on Film: Interview with Belcourt Programming Director Toby Leonard
Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre has lived a long and fruitful life, first opening in 1925 as the silent movie house The Hillsboro Theatre. Since then, the Belcourt has housed the Grand Ole Opry, The Children’s Theatre of Nashville, the Nashville Community Playhouse, and the Belcourt Cinema. In 1999, the theatre was forced to close, and a [...]
Youngblood on Film: The Emerging Genre of Cinema Anima
In the 90′s and 00′s, a group of international directors began to shape a new genre of cinema . . . unaware of each other or the synthesis they were fumbling towards. They were filmmakers from cinematically-marginalized countries such as Vietnam, Hungary, South Korea, Iran, Taiwan, Mexico, and Thailand. They admired the plot-light, mood-heavy cinema [...]
Youngblood on Film: The Nashville Film Festival
Greetings all. My intention for this week’s “Youngblood on Film” was to chart an emerging genre of filmmaking spearheaded by Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao Hsien, Shunji Iwai, and others: Cinema Anima. But the project is proving too ambitious, the story too unwieldy, and the deadline too . . . erm . . .expired. We’ll return [...]
Youngblood on Film: Kurosawa Centennial at the Belcourt
Nashville historic Belcourt Theatre continues to impress with astute scheduling choices. Consider last Sunday’s rare screening of Jean Eustache’s 3 1/2 hour The Mother and the Whore, Tarr Bela’s nearly 8 hour Satantango screening from a few years back, and the upcoming Akira Kurosawa 12 film retrospective.
If Kurosawa were alive today, he would be 100 years old; and that is reason enough for the Belcourt to screen 12 of his films. There’s nothing necessarily astute about a Kurosawa retrospective –after all, he’s the undisputed king of art house cinema. What makes the Belcourt’s summer-long retrospective so special is the films they selected. . . and the films they left out.
Our New Guest Reporter: Youngblood on Film
An Announcement: Jett and I are pleased to welcome Tony Youngblood, our mutual Nashville friend, to the site, with the first of what we hope will be regular dispatches from the front of his cinema-literate, emoto-passionate, and remarkably astute field of vision. (I may have just invented the word ‘emoto-passionate’, but it feels right…) To [...]
