My latest film criticism, “Three Masters: Spielberg, Anderson, Haneke, and Their Audience,” excerpted in the previous post, is recommended reading for the week at RogerEbert.com. If that doesn’t get you to read, I don’t know what to do with you. (But I’ll think of something.) A further excerpt: In Saving Private Ryan, the film’s ultimate sentimentality, […]
Three Film Masters
My latest film criticism is available now at Bright Lights Film Journal. “Three Masters: Spielberg, Anderson, Haneke, and Their Audience” addresses the question, as the tag line has it: “Is the filmmaker tyrant, aesthete, ringmaster, or hermit?“ It is commonly claimed by artists that they create for themselves. Wrote Stanley Fish, to whom I respond,”If […]
Season’s Jeer and Cheer
. No doubt many will be ritually watching It’s a Wonderful Life this holiday season. I recall with satisfaction when my brother, Jeff, and I discovered the film on late night television after a print was finally turned up in distributor mothballs, many years before the film became, for some, the tiresome phenomenon it has […]
CineFile – Drive
. with Ryan Gosling, by Nicolas Winding Refn. Primal eruption and withdrawal. Related articles New Images of Ryan Gosling in Nicolas Winding Refn’s ONLY GOD FORGIVES (collider.com) WTF: Nicolas Winding Refn Directing ‘Barbarella’ TV Series (slashfilm.com) ‘Only God Forgives’ Will Share The ‘Language’ Of ‘Drive’ (moviesblog.mtv.com) Behind the Scenes Photos: Ryan Gosling in ‘Only God Forgives’ […]
Go to the Theater this Sunday
Last Sunday on the sad red earth saw the thirteenth and concluding installment of the film noir Double Down. (You can catch up with DD here. Man murders his rich identical twin, assumes the twin’s identity, and pursues the same woman, a detective, as a lover – what’s not to like?) Beginning this weekend, the […]