Haiku Squared: Trouble Every Day
I have no problem
choosing films of morbid love
from our Netflix queue.
Culture Snob
Conventional Contrarianism: A Practical Guide
Brevity is the soul of wit, that motherfucker Shakespeare once wrote, and even though he’s wrong, I’ll keep this short. RogerEbert.com editor Jim Emerson has created the Contrarianism Blog-a-thon. I will enlighten you on how to be a conventional contrarian.
Tagged: Blog-a-thons, Contrarianism, Critics, Jim Emerson, Ways of Watching
Not-So-Drunken Commentary Track: The Descent
Neil Marshall’s The Descent approaches being a perfect terror movie. And because terror is unique to cinema among art forms – it doesn’t translate well to the page because the narrative has to slow down for the reader, and it doesn’t translate at all to any other medium – The Descent approaches being a perfect movie, period.
The End Is Near! Vote for Me!
In Davis Guggenheim’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a high-angle shot of George W. Bush is followed by a shot of Al Gore looking down out of an airplane window. The juxtaposition delivers a subtle but forceful message: Al Gore is God, gazing in harsh judgment on this Republican president.
RIFF: Reading Is Fucking Formidable
2007 will be the year of reading. Having read exactly zero books from cover to cover in 2006, I decided that I would read two books a month this year. I am a slow reader. I will choose short books.
Ode to an Anachronism
It’s not hard to figure out why Robert Altman was the center of attention with last summer’s A Prairie Home Companion – even though we didn’t know at the time of its release that it would be his final movie.
Mix-and-Match Haiku: Kissed
To slake your thirst for Culture Snob poetry, as well as the interactive, I have crafted multiple options for haiku based on Lynne Stopkewich’s 1996 movie Kissed. If you’ve never seen it or heard of it, I think you’ll get the gist pretty quickly.
Tagged: Bodily Emissions, Death, Haiku, Kissed, Lynne Stopkewich, Poetry, Sex
Interpretation Trumps Inspiration
Rather than merely join the chorus of those who dismissed Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia, and rather than cast a dissent from the general critical favor accorded The Illusionist, I’ll respond to critics I enjoy and respect whose perspectives on these movies differ significantly from mine.
Tagged: Brian De Palma, James Ellroy, Magic, Neil Burger, Reviews, The Black Dahlia, The Illusionist
The Forgotten Audience
Because I do have a memory – not a very good one, but a memory nonetheless – I can save myself some work by providing Rupert Murray – the filmmaker behind Unknown White Male – with a few lessons I’ve learned from other movies and simply link to previous essays.
She Shoots Horses, Don’t She?
Marnie is narratively and technically artless – literal and obvious and shrill and nearly naked in its themes and concerns, a story clumsily built around Freudian repression. Yet Marnie is not the travesty many people think.