Devil on My Trail
My first thought after watching Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men – amid groans from others in the theater – was that I understood why some people hate it.
Movies
Box Office Power Rankings: December 7-9, 2007
In its opening weekend, The Golden Compass made more than twice as much money as any of its competitors, yet in the great equalizer that is the Box Office Power Rankings, it still ended up in third place, and barely beat out This Christmas.
Bye Bye, Blog-a-thon. Stay Strong.
Blog-a-thons are unusual in the world in that they seem a genuine win-win-win proposition. The hosts of blog-a-thons get traffic from participants’ readers. Participants get traffic from new readers through the host(s). And the world gets new writing, analysis, provocation, and thought that it wouldn’t have had without the blog-a-thon. In the case of Short-Film Week, we generated roughly three dozen new pieces on short films. This is a small, good thing.
Tagged: Blog-a-thons, Short-Film Week
Short-Film Week: In Praise of the Music Video
Two case studies: Sometimes and somehow, the music video can do things (beyond the song) that seem impossible in any other format, regardless if the aims are serious or silly.
Short-Film Week: The Bar at the End of the Line
The guy who dominates Stefan Nadelman’s documentary short Terminal Bar could be related to Robert Crumb, both in his physical features and his matter-of-fact way. He talks about everything from death by alcohol to bathroom blowjobs to the “destituted” people who frequented the titular establishment where he tended bar for a decade. And like the famous cartoonist Crumb, he seems perpetually amused, and it looks suspiciously like a defense mechanism.
Short-Film Week: A Sweet, Whimsical, Dirty Movie About Rape or Regression
An object within an object of the same type – the novel within a novel, the film within a film – is rarely considered out of its context. Its meanings, and its narrative or thematic roles, are derived from its conversation with the larger work. But if the object is nearly whole – that is, if it’s not just a fragment, if we have a reasonably full sense of its shape, structure, and content – looking at it in isolation can bear fruit and is an act of respect.
Box Office Power Rankings: November 30-December 2, 2007
Behold the power of the Box Office Power Rankings! Able to turn the Coen brothers’ box-office weakling – No Country for Old Men, 10th in revenue this past weekend – into the maid of honor. (And, yes, I recognize that I’ve crafted a metaphoric non sequitur.) Enchanted still tops our rankings, but No Country was first in three of our four criteria, including per-theater average.
Short-Film Week: A Short Film About Failure
My version of Robert Zemeckis’ Contact uses the same source material but starts at the 33-minute, 25-second mark and ends at one hour, 26 minutes, and five seconds. It’s a marvel of economy. Let me explain myself.
Tagged: Contact, God, Reviews, Robert Zemeckis, Science Fiction, Short Films, Short-Film Week
Short-Film Week: “Gem” as Faint Praise
The animated T.R.A.N.S.I.T. is a feature-film plot distilled into 10 minutes, and it shows the ways in which the short film is more forgiving than longer cinematic forms. This movie operates wordlessly almost as a plot outline, and it’s gorgeous to look at and challenging to keep up with. It feels like a small, perfectly cut gem. On reflection, that’s a good analogy, because Piet Kroon’s 1997 short is a beautiful piece of visual craftsmanship that fails as art in any rational analysis.
Short-Film Week: The Addict
Like most of his movies, David Cronenberg’s Camera is a sly piece of work. On the surface, it’s an illustration of the effects of lighting, camera movement, recording format, performance, and even costumes. Camera appears to be Cronenberg’s most warm and human work. But it packs a lot into its running time, and, on closer inspection, it’s a downer about submission to addiction.
