Say you watch Korean movies. Often, outside the peninsula itself, this means you’ve gotten into the murderous grotesquerie of Chan-wook Park’s “Vengeance Trilogy,” or Joon-ho Bong’s simultaneously goofy and solemn political allegory of a monster mashThe Host, or any amount of Ki-duk Kim’s vast, high-profile (and as some fans admit, uneven) output. But mention the [...]
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Name your favorite film. Now define favorite. Is it the one you admire the most? The one you watch most often? The one that keeps surfacing in your thoughts with the least prompting? Or simply the one you name when asked, hoping to project an affiliated identity in so doing? Your definition of the term, [...]
Monday, September 3, 2012
Being someone for whom aloneness feels like living burial, I suppose I could have chosen a more suitable life than one involving so much reading, writing, and filmgoing. True, you do sit among dozens to hundreds of others when you see a movie, but that strikes me as isolation by other means. I suppose [...]
The filmmaker Chris Marker, who passed away Sunday on his 91st birthday, rose to cinematic respectability amid the storm of press surrounding the French New Wave and Left Bank Film Movement in the fifties and sixties. Publicity-averse and deliberately enigmatic, he always seemed to stand, untroubled, within the storm’s eye, and there found just [...]
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Rudie Obias and West Anthony invited me on their podcast The Auteurcast, a show which picks out fascinating directors and discusses all their films one-by-one. I joined them during a Stanley Kubrick cycle. They would have had no way of knowing this — except due to sheer film-geek likelihood — but Kubrick counts among the [...]
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
This, as the internet cats say, is relevant to my interests. Urbanized, a documentary about how world cities have changed in the 21st century, comes as part three of Gary Hustwit’s “design trilogy.” I still use Helvetica, the first part, as a kind of litmus test: if someone turns it off partway through or doesn’t [...]
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The latest episode of the film podcast Battleship Pretension [RSS, iTunes] features yours truly on the third mic, discussing the history of the “Indiewood” movement in the United States. If you’ve personally experienced any important chapter in the history of American independent film, you’ve experienced this one: it saw the combined forces of the Sundance [...]
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Having slouched around screenings of midcentury Godard, Truffaut, and Antonioni, all of whom have enjoyed a recent surge of popularity at Los Angeles revival houses, I can’t stifle my standard lament about why They Don’t Make Movies Like These Anymore. But a more accurate lament would ask why They Never Really Made Movies That [...]
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Freshly up on 3QuarksDaily, my latest Humanists film column on Pedro Almodóvar’s’s The Flower of My Secret: Pedro Almodóvar’s overarching project, spanning three decades and counting, makes the most sense to me as the redemption of the soap-operatic. I see it in his films’ bright colors; in their plots driven by the sturm und drang [...]
I give you Observer, the short film I shot in the summer of 2010, now unlocked for your viewing pleasure. It stayed under password-protected wraps for a while there due to the rules of the various film festivals I submitted it to. Now that I’ve fallen into absolute confusion about the very purpose of [...]