The Year Was 1972......
Goldwater was in the White House. America's young men were being sent to Algeria to execute a dying colonialist politic. The Washington Generals had just...
2022-01-11 02:42:10 +0000 UTC View Post
msicism posts
Happening (Audrey Diwan, 2021)
Need it be said? Happening, this year's Golden Lion winner and the sophomore feature from Audrey Diwan, is timely as they come. It's a film abou...
2022-01-09 20:50:58 +0000 UTC View PostJanie's Janie (Geri Ashur / Newsreel Collective, 1971)
This is a film I always meant to catch up with, mostly because I have been reading about it in passing for nearly twenty years. Janie's Janie is...
2022-01-08 01:33:40 +0000 UTC View PostA River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces (Shengze Zhu, 2021)
It's sometimes the case that a given artwork takes on more meaning that it might have originally because of unexpected historical developments, and that ...
2022-01-07 22:36:13 +0000 UTC View PostWhat Do We See When We Look At the Sky? (Alexandre Koberidze, 2021)
While there's no question that Koberidze's second feature film is one of the most formally accomplished cinematic works of 2021, I still find myself havi...
2022-01-06 19:30:32 +0000 UTC View PostI'm 50!
And I can KICK! And STRETCH! And KICK!
Okay, now that the year-end crunch is winding down -- still need to watch un film de Margalit* Gyllenhaa...
2022-01-04 17:13:48 +0000 UTC View PostLast Few Viewings of 2021 (part two)
Labyrinth of Cinema (Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 2019)
A film so ambitious in scope that it becomes almost aggressive, Labyrinth of Ci...
2022-01-03 06:41:13 +0000 UTC View PostLast Few Viewings of 2021 (part one)
North by Current (Angelo Madsen Minax, 2021)
Minax's deeply humane documentary about a family tragedy might productively be studie...
2022-01-02 22:14:14 +0000 UTC View PostYear-End Lightning Hoedown No. 6
"I just thought I'd do a little hoedown."
Poe...
2021-12-28 01:29:39 +0000 UTC View Post⚡Lightning 〇Round 5
Outside Noise (Ted Fendt, 2021)
As I suggested on Twitter, I admire Ted Fendt's films quite a bit more than I like them. He is par...
2021-12-27 05:09:07 +0000 UTC View PostLightning Round 4
Although "lightning" may not be the best adjective here. I'm still finding it hard to view movies, as there is always some IKEA that needs my special tou...
2021-12-22 22:23:38 +0000 UTC View PostYear-End Lighning Round #3
I do want to apologize, not just for the highly infrequent posting, but for the shoddy viewing as well. There's just too much going on, and I can only work in brief spurts.
2021-12-19 20:03:04 +0000 UTC
View Post
Drive, or Remain Parked?
I need your help regarding the apparent Film of the Year.
Should I:
2021-12-13 17:33:53 +0000 UTC View PostYear-End Lightning Round (Part 2)
Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021)
One would have to be heartless not to be affected by the story of Amin, an Afghan refugee who e...
2021-12-11 11:00:46 +0000 UTC View PostYear-End Poll: Lightning Round, Part 1 (updated)
Passing (Rebecca Hall, 2021)
This adaptation of Nella Larsen's 1929 novel is certainly timely, in terms of its concern with racism...
2021-12-08 23:27:07 +0000 UTC View PostPutting It Together
(Stephen Sondheim, RIP)
It's been a busy couple of months, and I very much appreciate your patience. Jen, the animals, and I are now settling in ou...
2021-12-06 07:50:59 +0000 UTC View PostCatastrophe, Minimal and Maximal
The Night (Tsai Ming-liang, 2021)
The English title of Tsai's latest experimental short, The Night, seems to ask for cons...
2021-11-26 00:48:55 +0000 UTC View PostMemoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)
Q: What if the machine kicked back?
I've needed some time to think about Memoria. Although there is no mistaking this film for th...
2021-11-21 04:52:41 +0000 UTC View PostThe Scary of Sixty-First (Dasha Nekrasova, 2021)
It's hopeless, really. If I were to actually take the time to articulate how stupid this is, I'd be falling into its trap, demonstrating that I'm the kin...
2021-11-20 04:12:38 +0000 UTC View PostJane by Charlotte (Charlotte Gainsbourg, 2021)
Hovering in the distance of Gainsbourg's portrait of her mother Jane Birkin is an earlier film, Agnès Varda's 1988 experimental doc Jane B. par AgnÃ...
2021-11-17 05:34:20 +0000 UTC View PostFlag Day (Sean Penn, 2021)
Cannes sure does distort things, huh? Penn's last directorial outing, The Last Face, was god-awful. It's script was risible, and Penn's director...
2021-11-14 02:21:43 +0000 UTC View PostProto-Vines: an Inquiry
I spend a bit of time on TikTok, mostly so I can keep minimally abreast of my son's cultural life. I find it occasionally amusing, but as a platform it's extremely circumscribed. I'm not referring to the time limit, which was recently expanded fro...
2021-11-11 22:12:28 +0000 UTC View PostDune (Denis Villeneuve, 2021)
I will freely admit that I am not the target audience for Dune. It's not just that I'm not a genre guy, although that tends to be true. I'm only...
2021-11-10 02:45:08 +0000 UTC View PostMemories? Call 1-800-GOT-JUNK
Tonight, I was catching up with We (or Nous, if you prefer), the documentary by Alice Diop that played in Berlin and ND/NF. At this poi...
2021-11-03 04:06:25 +0000 UTC View PostThe Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes, 2021)
I'm very glad indeed that Haynes' The Velvet Underground exists. It's an admirable attempt at something very few rock-docs even think to do: pla...
2021-11-02 01:32:22 +0000 UTC View PostThe Beta Test (Jim Cummings and PJ McCabe, 2021)
Cummings' debut feature Thunder Road was quite the opening salvo, a film defined by its full-on embrasure of squeamish embarrassment ...
2021-10-31 00:34:20 +0000 UTC View PostOne Second (Zhang Yimou, 2020)
This is hard to really evaluate, of course, because it arrives as damaged goods. The PRC engages in censorship all the time, but seldom is it this high-p...
2021-10-26 21:26:03 +0000 UTC View PostChecking In
So obviously there hasn't been much action here. If you check in occasionally with my Films Seen lists (on Letterboxd or the Academic Hack), you've proba...
2021-10-25 22:55:05 +0000 UTC View PostDelphine's Prayers (Rosine Mbakam, 2021)
Mbakam's latest documentary is essentially a portrait film, and as such probably bears comparison with some of the classics of the subgenre, like Shirley...
2021-10-19 04:46:36 +0000 UTC View PostThe Crusade (Louis Garrel, 2021)
The Crusade is the final cinematic project of Jean-Claude Carrière, which is both odd and poignant. He co-wrote this featurette with Garrel, an...
2021-10-19 04:17:15 +0000 UTC View Post