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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Up today, my latest Humanists column for 3Quarksdaily on Aki Kaurismäki’s La Vie de Bohème: Do even lovers of world cinema think much about Finland’s working class? Does Aki Kaurismäki think about much else? Clearly, when not thinking about Finland’s working class, he thinks about world cinema, even going so far as to produce a […]
After moving to Los Angeles, I found myself woken up on Saturdays and Sundays by a woman out on the street repeatedly singing, with a faintly surreal rare-bird intonation, the phrase, “Tamales! Y champurado!” In Mexico City, I discovered the filling wonders of a breakfast of tamales and champurado. (We actually drank strawberry atole, but […]
[Might as well stick to the format for a while. Seems to work.] I have friends here who insist that, despite the surface noise, not much in the way of culture really goes on in Los Angeles. While I suppose I should defer, to some extent, to their seniority in the city, I did fly […]