You Are Blind Because You Remain Attached to Previous Incarnations of My Greatness
It is, of course, bad form to kick M. Night Shyamalan when he’s down, but here goes.
Culture Snob
The Tell-Tale Tapes? The Trouble with Caché
What’s unfortunate about Michael Haneke’s Caché is that the writer/director has created a movie that requires such intensive decoding at its terminals that it’s easy to overlook the rest of the movie – to, in fact, miss its entire point. By spending so much time and effort on the beginning and the ending, we neglect essential questions: What is the film trying to say? Is this an effective way to communicate that message?
Thank you! Good night!
This is how closely I’ve been paying attention to the world: Sleater-Kinney, one of my favorite bands, announced in June that it was going on “indefinite hiatus,” and I finally figure it out in August.
Tagged: Sleater-Kinney
My Wife Is No Miss January
In Calendar, writer/director Atom Egoyan offers a film version of musical minimalism, with its emphasis on long shots, repetition, and minor variation, and with just a handful of camera setups. Nothing is superfluous.
Tagged: Atom Egoyan, Blog-a-thons, Calendar, Opening Shots, Reviews
How to Apologize … Mostly
Mel Gibson’s second apology is, for the most part, a model for celebrity contrition. It does not obfuscate. It does not fail to admit the sin. It does not blame booze. Best of all, it does not implicitly fault those who were wronged (“I apologize to all those who [are so fucking stupid that they] might have been offended … ”). Instead, he owns up.
Tagged: Apologies, Mel Gibson
Cut the Cheese, Please!
While holding his nose, Daniel Neman dares not call that which offends by its proper name. Instead, he dubs it a “flatulence joke.” And he is not amused.
Tagged: Bodily Emissions, Critics, Daniel Neman, Farts
Double Stuf(f)ed
Rolling Stone’s “Rock and Roll Daily” has started a series on double albums that can be (and should have been) pared down to single discs. And not just one 80-minute CD; the idea is to hack the bloated monster down to an LP.
Tagged: Double Albums, Rolling Stone
Canadian? Or the Young Marcia Cross?
Cinematical is was running a caption contest for this photo:
Alas, at the request of some evil movie studio, the photo has been replaced and the offered captions deleted.
Drunken Commentary Track: Incident at Loch Ness
Werner Herzog once ate his shoe, so why wouldn’t he chase the Loch Ness monster? What’s a little harder to swallow is that the famously idiosyncratic German director – who pulled a boat over a mountain for 1982’s Fitzcarraldo – would team up with Zak Penn, a Hollywood hack who has written such gems as PCU, Inspector Gadget, and Elektra. Yet that’s what happens in Incident at Loch Ness, a 2004 movie that documents their collaboration.
Former Vice President in the Water
In a review full of great lines, here is perhaps the best from Jim Emerson’s pan of the Great and Powerful and Self-Absorbed M. Night’s The Lady in the Water: “They live in water and are desperate to communicate warnings to Man, but Man has forgotten how to listen. They are sort of like amphibious Al Gores.”
