Presumably, any moderately blog-centric “critic” end of the year best-of listing is the easiest part of the job–compiling a blurb heavy inventory of all of the films reviewed over the year. That is if said reviewer actually has access to the myriad documentaries produced and shown around the multifarious festival circuit, the breadth of which [...]
As far as years in music go, 1970 was a good one: Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, and Iggy Pop & The Stooges’s Fun House were all released, as were swan song LPs for The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, and Simon & Garfunkel, while John Lennon and George Harrison launched their [...]
What is this nonsense? This is a short film about an actor named Noah (me) who is $5k short of qualifying for health insurance for his family (true) when he gets Bell’s Palsy (also true)…SO, he decides to make a short film about an actor named Noah who gets Bell’s Palsy then makes a movie [...]
While vacationing at my mother’s house in the Virginia countryside this summer I decided it might be appropriate to check out Terrence Malick’s The New World from the local library. Though I truly love Tree of Life and rather like his earlier films I nevertheless didn’t have high expectations. It’s almost a given that Hollywood [...]
The other day I was perusing one of McSweeney’s many humorous lists and moved my click finger over one entitled, “5 People You Meet In Hell” which when clicked upon revealed number 5 as, “Gene Hackman. That guy is everywhere.” True. Or he used to be anyway. One of my grandfather’s favorite actors was Gene [...]
A man holding a hatchet chases a car full of gangsters down an empty, wide boulevard. He looks down and sees blood pouring from a bullet wound in his abdomen. He approaches the first car he sees. A man on a phone screams and flees. He continues to chase the car of gangsters. But he [...]
While studying photography on a secluded part of the south coast of California in the late nineties I dated a frisky young blonde co-ed for a little more than a year. In our breaks from study we camped in Big Sur, visited her father’s home in Palo Alto and accompanied her family to their cabin [...]
Consider this situation: a woman wants to leave her country to live abroad, only her husband refuses to go along with the plan. He wants to stay put in the big city they live in, most importantly because his ailing father suffers from advanced Alzheimer’s. This point of difference being irreconcilable, they decide on a [...]
“Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” — Hassan-i Sabbah Henry Kissinger called power the ultimate aphrodisiac. We can see how power attracts all sorts of people toward [...]
Even as it becomes more mainstream, the lines of modern documentary film are ever blurring. No longer is documenting, “what is real?” the most apt, but rather, how do we instill the viewer with a big enough sense of awe at the world (and universe) around them to get them to become activists themselves? [...]
The demise of cinema marks a loss even greater than that of vinyl or even books. After all, music sounds almost the same whether played on a record or an mp3, and e-readers do at least replicate the format of paper books. But the cinema? However gratifying it might be to download a movie torrent [...]
Because we live in a 24-hour news cycle you’ve probably heard the story slipped in somewhere between nuclear contamination fears, carnage in Afghanistan and sexual indiscretions of Republican candidates—2005 YU55, a massive asteroid four hundred meters in diameter will pass within the orbit of the moon on November 8th. It’s the closest an asteroid this [...]
“You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.” — Jodorowsky’s Alchemist Cinema was developed more than a hundred years ago with purely entertainment purposes in mind: it was a way for an entrepreneur to make a buck. However, it didn’t take the State too long to discover its manifest possibilities as a tool of [...]
“Du grand art dans la noirceur cauchemardesque.” * — Michel Lebrun, on Thierry Jonquet’s work. Throughout the millennia spiders have been represented in art as creative and cruel, perspicacious and pernicious. They can be as deceptive and deadly as they are delicate and demure. Tarantulas, basically bigger, hairier versions, belong to the same order–Araneae–as their [...]
