“When it spills, it means milk’s been spilt. Nothing more. It doesn’t mean the world’s fallen apart or that the milk symbolizes a mother’s milk which her child couldn’t drink because she died early, for example… and that’s cinema. Unfortunately it doesn’t mean anything else.” -Krzysztof Kieslowski from The Films of Krzysztof Kieslowski: The Liminal [...]
Read MoreExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close is based on a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, who also wrote Everything is Illuminated, the movie by the same name being one of my all-time favorites. In each of these novels, Foer takes on heavy topics–9/11 and World War II–and the resulting transfers to film may not be everyone’s [...]
Read MoreI will often get angry about U.S. remakes of foreign films, and it happens quite often, so this may explain my general demeanor. Eat Drink Man Woman becomes Tortilla Soup, Breathless (1960) becomes Breathless (1983), Il Postino becomes The Postman. That last one’s not really a remake, but I like to imagine that they were [...]
Read MoreWhatever history will decide were the merits of the Cold War, and beyond a shared belief in political fear mongering and secret microphones it’s all a bit dubious, it cannot be argued that the prime beneficiaries of nearly 40 years of undercover ‘spy-jinks’ (a word I just invented, and will now trademark in hopes of [...]
Read MoreCarnage comes with an excellent pedigree. It features the talents of Oscar winners Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, and Oscar nominee John C. Reilly. Their collective filmographies contain some stellar performances, but I don’t think that this was one of them. Roman Polanski (also an Oscar winner for The Pianist) co-wrote the screenplay (with [...]
Read MoreAnyone who’s ever seen Adventures in Babysitting will instantly recognize The Sitter as little more than a copy of that classic 1987 comedy, albeit a crass, lazy and at times bizarre copy that represents a new career low for director David Gordon Green.
Read MoreElegant, worldly and perhaps the consummate summation of the French male ideal, singer/songwriter/post-modern rake Serge Gainsbourg’s music was as much a last gasp of the cabaret era as it was a life giving breath to the idea of “pop” music as grandiose, surreal storytelling. Admittedly his elegance was more Keith Richards, gutter cosmopolitan than court [...]
Read MoreThe Prince and the Showgirl has never existed on DVD, and The Video Station has been hanging on to its VHS copy for many years now, although it never rented much – the result of a very lukewarm reputation. My Week With Marilyn is the story of the making of The Prince and the Showgirl, [...]
Read MoreIn a music magazine… sometime ago… a paraphrased quote… Nostalgia is for someone who’s stopped dreaming. But if we dream of our past, it’s still dreaming, isn’t it? Time has only marinated these memories so they can gestate and reform. We can start again with the rich loam of our history… we can… wait, that’s [...]
Read MoreTintin may not, heretofore at least, have been a common household name here in the States (maybe due to frequent confusion with his similarly-named American canine contemporary). Even Steven Spielberg (who directed this film) only discovered Hergé’s Belgian comic strip series after someone compared it to Raiders of the Lost Ark. But though Indiana Jones [...]
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