The deaths last week of movie writers and directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have incited all sorts of commentary about the “art” films of yesteryear and the people who made them. Tied up in these discussions is one key assumption: that everyday people think these movies are boring, whether they’ve actually seen them or not.
It was a summer in the early 1980s. We were on a family vacation. Perhaps to Disney World. It seemed that at every stop on our journey, Under the Rainbow was in a constant loop on HBO on our hotel television. We must have seen parts of it a dozen times. Memory is a fickle thing, but I remember that the PG-rated farce had one bare breast that pops out when the little people are running through a communal dressing room, or somesuch. I mention this because I can, as we have arrived at the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon, running Wednesday, July 9, through Sunday, July 13. This is the official Culture Snob birthday party, with this little site celebrating its fifth birthday on July 10. So give me a present: Write something for my blog-a-thon!
My 2008 album begins in Utah and ends in (or near) hell. Whether you think the distance between the starting point and the destination is a lot of territory or not much, we do get to travel pretty far afield. There’s sunny California with the Botticellis, lovely inner-city Baltimore with DoMaJe, Iraq with the estimable Danny Elfman, and someplace sublimely absurd with Flight of the Conchords.
This is a curated index of the content on Culture Snob, presently divided into the following sections: Movies | Televsion For clarity, “television” is defined for index purposes by its episodic nature. Movies made for television are “movies” here. A few things are counted in both categories. This index is a work in progress. Movies …
Dearest Emily, Right now, your primary activities are eating, reaching, sleeping, pooping, laughing, peeing, bouncing, crying, sitting up, and spitting up, but before I know it you’ll be running around and saying all the nasty words you’ve learned from your parents. And before we get too wrapped up in soccer practice and homework, I want to ask a favor: Each year on my birthday, I want my present from you to be sitting with me and your mother and watching a movie, and talking about it afterward.
Have you ever read or heard a discussion of a movie that made you think, They just don’t get it? Have you ever wondered, Am I the only person who saw the movie that way? Culture Snob is hosting a forum for essays, arguments, and provocations on misunderstood movies. The blog-a-thon will run Wednesday, May 16, through Sunday, May 20, although I won’t turn my nose up at contributions that arrive before then. The premise is that movies are marketed and evaluated coarsely and simplistically, and that they often contain a richness that’s never mined by critics and casual audiences.
Have you calmed down yet? Are you over the orgasmic delight you felt at the way David Chase defied all predictions about the end of his beloved series, The Sopranos? Have you recovered from your rage about ambiguity, a lack of closure, and Journey? Good. Now let’s clear a few things up.
Aussie crime thriller ‘The Square’ is poised to explore guilt in a handful of characters but instead becomes a ridiculous, contrived tragedy
I was surprised after watching (and then reading reviews of) the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man that there was such a fervent (if small) backlash against it. The movie – about a Job-like Jewish professor in a Minnesota suburb in the late 1960s – struck me as so right that I didn’t allow for opposite reactions. Yet there they are.
Smoke begins in Auggie Wren’s cigar shop with omniscient chatter about the Mets and ends in a deli with a made-up tale about how Auggie got his first camera. Almost everything in between is also bullshit, in the sense that its relationship with objective reality is utilitarian. We speak the truth when it suits our needs, but we shouldn’t let it get in the way of the story we’re trying to spin.
