A New Beginning for Opening Shots?
It appears that Scanners’ Jim Emerson has a renewed interest in his fantastic Opening Shots Project, after a hiatus of more than a year for the series.
Tagged: Jim Emerson, Opening Shots, Ways of Watching
Ways of Watching
Shit That Didn’t Get Wrote: Memento and Friends
I start an essay for most every movie I see. Whether I actually finish the essay – or even make any headway on a thesis – is another matter entirely. Today I’ll be the old man who runs out of candy at Halloween and starts handing out worthless crap that’s lying around the house.
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.
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.
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.
The Eyes of Anna
Writer/director Michael Haneke’s 1997 film Funny Games feels like a response to something that hadn’t happened yet. Sure, we’d had Natural Born Killers and other ultra-violent movies, but the fetishism of agony hadn’t yet become a crass trend.
Open Hand
There are dozens of close-ups of hands in Peter Weir’s Fearless, and mostly the extremities belong to Max Klein, the distant plane-crash survivor played by Jeff Bridges. What follows is not a comprehensive catalog but covers the majority of these shots. They are presented in the order in which they appear in the movie.
Fear Is Not Enough
In David Cronenberg’s The Brood, the monsters have the size and shape (and snowsuits) of little children, but everything else about them is off. You could point to their foreheads, or their noses, or their skin tone, or the color of their hair, or the way they move, but that misses the bigger picture. There’s no single element that makes these creatures grotesque. It’s the collection of features and details that approach being normally human without ever getting there.
Tagged: David Cronenberg, Horror, The Brood, Ways of Watching
Strength in Numbers
Among cinematic monsters with any staying power, is there any quite as pathetic as the zombie?
Tagged: Blog-a-thons, Death, George A. Romero, Horror, Ways of Watching, Zombies
Snuffing Out and Getting Off
With its dismal first-weekend performance at the box office, Captivity offers an opportunity to bemoan (or cheer) the diminished commercial prospects for that genre we’re no longer allowed to call “torture porn.” At The Exploding Kinetoscope, Chris Stangl recently argued (in the context of Hostel: Part II) that pinning that label on something “is a non-position that allows a critic not to engage the work.” There are some interesting arguments here, but I reject the assertion that “torture porn” isn’t an appropriate and meaningful tag for the genre. And I don’t think the phrase is a dismissive put-down.
Tagged: Horror, Torture, Ways of Watching
