Tag: cinephile
Fugitive visions: Foreign film and the new iconography
One perfect shot does not a bad film fix. I learned this many years ago during a screening of Alek Keshishian’s With Honors (1994), a Sven Nykvist-lensed flick that, if I remember correctly, featured among the generally dreary sequences an incredible, blink-and-it’s-gone image of a church towering behind Brendan Fraser’s character. It didn’t make the movie watchable,…
Cinema and ‘The Sopranos’: When two forms collide
Television, and the experience of watching television, have undergone a radical shift in the twenty-first century. While the internet promises (or threatens) to make the experience of watching broadcasted TV entirely redundant, as well as altering the viewing experience irrecoverably from that of a weekly drip feed to that of a televisual binge, the quality…
A trip to “The Pictures”: Watching movies in Post-WWII London
In London’s working class districts, during the late 1950s and well into the late 1960s, you did not hear the phrase ‘going to the cinema’. It would always be ‘going to the pictures’, or the common slang term, ‘the flicks’. This was a hangover from the earliest days of silent film, when the flickering of…
Stanley Kubrick: Remembering the past, present, future, and the eternal return of the family in four films
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Stanley Kubrick may have been correct in assigning Richard Strauss to the apes and Johann Strauss to the spacemen. Standing somewhere in the middle of this evolution, I wonder which creature has it worse, the screeching primate or the cosmic amphibian. Certainly, our robotic dullard of the future could…
Hong Kil Dong: The Ironic and the Indestructible
At a recent Melbourne International Film Festival screening of North Korea’s little seen gem, Hong Kil Dong (1986), one attendee enthusiastically declared to the entire cinema that it was the best film he’d ever seen. His statement was not delivered without irony, but he still meant it. The story, so far as it goes, is…