2011 Movie Of The Year: The Tree of Life
In 2011, a year of many good movies (my own motley list includes: Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Bridesmaids, Weekend, The Muppet Movie, Buck and Rise of the Planet of the Apes), one stands out in every possible way: Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Naturally, we in Iowa City never got to eat of The...
Talking Movies: Great Weekend
You’re likely to feel some righteous indignation immediately after watching Andrew Haigh’s Weekend—the new British, mumblecore, gay-romance movie—at the Bijou from Dec. 2-8. No, I don’t mean that you’ll be bothered by the gay sex. Regardless of your sexual politics or persuasions, you’ll be struck by the movie’s candor and humanity. Nor do I mean...
Oops, Netflix Did it Again
Now Showing Global Lens 2011 Since 2003 the Global Lens film series has been providing a platform for interesting movies from around the world. Their board, including such modern masters as Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar and Béla Tarr, has chosen nine fascinating films which premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,...
Talking Movies: The Future Is Now
Richard Wagner dreamt of a Gesamtkunstwerk, “a total artwork,” a theatrical production that puts the entire human imagination into play and expresses nothing short of the truth. Metropolis--Fritz Lang’s operatic, balletic, mythic, expressionistic, crazy, nightmarish, silent movie--is about as gesamt a Kunstwerk as there is, especially if you add to it the live music...
Talking Movies: Film Fests 2011
Is this heaven? No, it’s the Hardacre Film Festival, every bit as magical as a diamond in a cornfield where the ghosts of old baseball players congregate. Every August, in the town of Tipton, Iowa (population 3,155), great movies, filmmakers from all over the country and interesting Iowans magically appear in a gorgeous old movie...
Talking Movies: Some Liked it Hot
In 1925, Willis Carrier, the inventor of the air conditioner, convinced Paramount Pictures to install his relatively new system in the Rivoli Theater, their big movie house under construction in Times Square. It was a brilliant decision.
Talking Movies: Is Quentin Tarantino Overrated?
The featured director this month in the Englert’s American Filmmakers Series is Quentin Tarantino. True Romance, which he wrote but didn’t direct, is showing Tuesday, May 10, and Pulp Fiction, his dubious masterpiece, plays the following Thursday. Does the director of Kill Bill: Vol. 2 and Inglourious Basterds deserve to be ranked alongside John Cassavettes,...
Talking Movies: A Caricature with Character
Directed by Miguel Arteta--of Youth in Revolt and The Good Girl--Cedar Rapids represents yet another stereotypical journey through the comic banality of Middle America. Amusingly, the reviews of the film, good or bad, are more trite than the film itself--I'll refrain from using such repossessed phrases as “hayseed” and “flyover country” or references to the...
WikiLeaks and the Movies
In a recent “dump” of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, Putin and Medvedev were compared to Batman and Robin. The Slovenian philosophical rock star Slavoj Žižek has taken the simile further and compared Julian Assange, the spooky mastermind behind WikiLeaks, to the Joker in The Dark Knight. In Christopher Nolan’s twist on the Batman myth, the...
Talking Movies: Enter the Void
Gaspar Noé will be known to some for his 2002 film Irreversible in which two men avenge the brutal rape and murder of a woman played by Italian beauty Monica Bellucci. Though its style and substance (particularly the rape scene) are notorious, it’s unfortunate that its infamy has surpassed its praise because I revere Irreversible...
Talking Movies: Hausu
Once in a while we come across a piece of art so outlandish that it defies all our categories; something which brings our neat generalizations up short. Hausu is one such work of art for me, and I suspect I am not alone. If you haven’t seen it, it may very well be the most...
Talking Movies: Well Spoke’n
I’ve now seen Vittorio De Sica’s masterpiece The Bicycle Thief twice in my life. I’m not sure how many more times I’ll be able to bear it. It’s too real; reality is too heartbreaking; and, as T.S. Eliot drily observes, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
Greatness Unbroken
Talking Movies: March 2010 – If you’re the kind of moviegoer who wishes you’d lived back when X was making movies (where X stands for your favorite great director), if like me you wish you had been there for the fresh projections of Godfather I rather than opening weekend of...Whatcha want: Soul Power
In Kinshasa, Zaire, on October 20, 1974, in what was billed as the Rumble in the Jungle, Muhammad Ali employed a strategy called the rope-a-dope, letting the reigning heavyweight champion George Foreman pummel him for the first several rounds of the fight. Then Ali began taunting the wearying champ, “They told me you could punch,...
Year Zilch
In the beginning was High Fidelity, at least as far as I’m concerned. An actor I’d never noticed before by the name of Jack Black was channeling Generation X energies like nobody else on the silver screen. His Barry, the record-store slacker-snob, stole the show and left me with the firm conviction that a new...
Talking Movies: Copping Out
Jody Hill’s Observe and Report is one weird movie. I’m pretty sure this dark comedy is meant to provoke reflection: The title suggests that the movie is holding the mirror up to our reality. In a sense, it is; the worst parts of the movie are the most interesting, and the best parts are pretty bad....
Talking Movies: Chaplin on the Economy
Someone should write an essay called “In Praise of Pretentiousness,” because in the first years of adulthood—please, those years only!—a little insufferable pretentiousness goes a long way. It was pretentiousness, I admit, that led me into a Charlie Chaplin film festival when I was a freshman at Grinnell: I showed up to appreciate silent films....
Talking Movies: Tears of a Clown
La Strada dir. Federico Fellini 108 mins In the early morning hours, at the end of a spirited drinking party, as passed-out sophisticates snore on the couches, an old man lectures two weary writers that tragedy and comedy have the same source, and that one who truly understands their root should be able to compose...
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