Tag: cinema
Paul Morrissey: Flesh, Trash, Heat and the Undead
“Don’t say “Warhol films” when you talk about my films! Are you so stupid, you talk to people like that? I have to live through this for fifty years. Everything I did, it’s Warhol this, or he did them with me. Forget it. He was incompetent, anorexic, illiterate, autistic, Asperger’s — he never did a thing in…
Opera vs. Cinema: It’s not a Remake, it’s Reimagined
It was Milos Forman’s Amadeus (1984) that introduced me to classical music. The film is like an appetiser, offering its audience a small taste of Mozart’s operas – a sliver of music and costumed spectacle that leaves you hungry for more. The last third of Foreman’s film is deeply intertwined with the opera “Don Giovanni”…
Don’t Look Back: Five Classic Wall-Breaking Endings
It’s not uncommon for characters to break the fourth wall in film. It’s usually implemented as a narrative technique and used throughout a work, most famously in Annie Hall (1977), Funny Games (1999), Netflix’s House of Cards (2013) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). These common uses seek to involve the audience more closely with…
Jim Jarmusch: Only Indie Left Alive
Early on in Jim Jarmusch’s first feature film, Permanent Vacation (1980), its vagabond hero Allie reads aloud a passage from Les Chants de Maldoror, and quickly announces he is bored by the meandering surrealistic narrative. Toward the end of Jarmusch’s eleventh and latest feature, Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), vampire hero Adam watches a talented…
Art and the Movies: The Shadow of Perfection
“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection,” said Michelangelo back in the day. In today’s high-end art world, where astronomical auction sales are now commonplace, there’s an impetus to maintain that exalted status for superstar artists both present and past. In this current state of affairs, where paintings can…