If two young women characters in a movie decide to take a vacation to an exotic locale before going to their respective colleges, the viewer can be certain one of two things will happen: They’ll have passionate sexual awakenings at the hands of a handsome stranger, or they’ll be unjustly imprisoned in a fucked-up judicial system with seemingly no hope of ever getting out. In the case of Brokedown Palace, we get both.
As filmmaking goes, Nick Broomfield’s Monster in a Box doesn’t have much to offer. It’s basically Spalding Gray sitting at a desk talking, with some lighting effects and unobtrusive but effective mood music by Laurie Anderson. So, naturally, it’s one of my favorite movies.
No good movie in recent memory has made me feel as perfectly awful and unsettled as David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. The movie is beautifully made, engaging, and sometimes even funny, but it’s also repulsive and disturbing, and not just because of the director’s now-standard disfigurement fetish.
Takeshi Kitano’s Fireworks is remarkable for many reasons, but its greatest achievement is taking a character capable of extreme violence and sweet tenderness and absolutely nothing in between and making him believable and rich. The feat looks all the more impressive considering the character’s perpetual mask of blank impassivity.
When I was nine or so, I saw a movie on HBO at a neighbor’s house. It was slow, had strange music, dealt with a picnic at some desert locale, and haunted me for years. In college, an English and film professor described the scariest movie he’d ever seen. It sounded awfully familiar. My roommate at the time recalled seeing the same movie as a child in a hotel room in Scotland. So we began a long journey to find a video copy of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.
Werner Herzog uses all the trappings of the story of Count Drac-oooo-lah in Nosferatu the Vampyre but doesn’t approach it as a tale of terror. Instead, he turns Bram Stoker’s basic plot (and F.W. Murnau’s silent classic) into a contemplative study of sacrifice and tragedy.
Jeffrey Blitz’s 2002 documentary Spellbound is such a completely charming movie that I feel a little bad for wanting more from it.
Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible is such a formal accomplishment that its already repellent content becomes even more so.
What interested me most seeing Who Framed Roger Rabbit recently were the movie’s political implications.
Andrew W.K. is smart enough to understand not only irony but how it is used by artists as a defense mechanism against criticism. That’s more than you can say about most rock stars. How then, does one explain the music of Andrew W.K.?
