The intimate non-affairs of Wong Kar Wei’s two great films, shot in a uniquely futuristic palette of colors, trace the playful, exceedingly charming but tragically brief connections that two people can have. In the Mood for Love explores its deeply connected couple in an unusual way: when they realize their often absent spouses are having […]

In Alphaville, Godard’s low budget, absurdist take on the science fiction genre, the traditional film noir private eye, a cynical and violent Lemmy Caution, inhabits an alternative universe of swimming pool executioners, lexicon erasures, and voice box AIs, yes, but also a Blade Runner-esque collection of barcoded seductresses, robotic enforcers, and an almost complete breakdown […]

Mainstream movies focus on pleasure. Sentimentality, jolts of fright, the momentum of action, the relief of laughter. They deal in escapism. They assail you with regulated thrills. Movies are clockwork mechanisms, relatively easy to engineer. And they typically steer clear of any troubling metaphysics that often result from looking at human life. Tarkovsky’s Solaris and […]

You could chalk up every move, either mental decision or physical locomotion, the characters make in these three movies to out of whack hormones. It is said that “Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast”1. For the short attention spans of young adults, prescribe music and dance. For moviegoers of all ages, too, for […]

Of course Eliza Doolittle, in this world we all live in, with her thin frame and 90 degree jawline and porcelain skin, was able to transform from a “guttersnipe” to a duchess in six months time. Her only barriers were her manners and her accent. Her margin for error was wide and her avenue for […]

Like the era of Day-Lewis’ tour de force, hate-filled construction Bill the Butcher, the politics of the 2010’s in America has laid bare bitter divisions about what is America. The need to either define or redefine a concept of “America” has emerged, probably mainly because one rich clown, protected by an army of lawyers, backed […]

The essential audacity at the core of 2001 is twofold. First, its four part structure, where each of the four short stories, “The Dawn of Man”, “Moon Mission”, “Jupiter Mission”, and “Jupiter and beyond infinity”, share truncated, unresolved endings and very loose, somewhat imperceptible, links to each other. Typical movie-goers, having expectations defined by classical […]

Great American satirists like Robert Altman and Tom Wolfe eagerly eviscerate traditional ideals, revealing the bureaucratic absurdity at the heart of war and patriotism, not to mention other great characteristics like hotheaded competitiveness, media consumption, consumerist excess, and political aggression. In every scene we find men as children playing at adulthood. Except that foremost among […]

Those to whom no distant horizons beckon … for whom no challenges remain … though they have inherited a Universe … they possess only empty sand! ~Silver Surfer # 1 (August 1968) How can you, after all, authentically fathom a man embracing an imminent magma death, or the Amazon, or Antarctica, or a caged animal, […]

A beautiful succession of eight compositions by Director Kenji Misumi for Fight, Zatoichi, Fight (1964). A mother sings a haunting lullaby. Deep focus, mist, aerial perspective, rule of thirds mixed with centered subjects, diagonals, framing devices – a library of effects in one minute of film. This is how you build melancholy and tension. More: […]

Warren Oates’ misanthropic anti-hero Bennie in Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a sleazy piano player and cheap suit, labeled a loser by murderers. His prostitute girlfriend Elita is the only one to treat him with respect, but she also loves Alfredo Garcia and gravitates towards any man that shows emotion, […]

Multi-layered jazz, 60’s era nightclubs, hidden swastikas, sweaty Village apartments, Rockefeller Center at Christmas… the score, compositions, strong chiaroscuro and the juxtapositon of characters in unusual environments set an edgy, doomed mood in Blast of Silence (1961). Hitman Frankie Bono watches children from a high story window, or tracks his victim from a rooftop, shot […]

Decasia (2002) is the astounding epilogue to Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King. Where the Lord of the Rings films adhere to traditional narrative structures, albeit highly reliant on extreme crosscutting and hallucinatory imagery, Decasia flips the script of the One Ring by telling it through the venomous eye and “head” of Tolkien’s main […]