We rarely take a Faulkner sentence and examine it in isolation. We generally don’t inspect a song’s introduction, or chorus, or bridge, without even dealing with the context of the whole. We don’t study the corner of a painting, pretending that there’s nothing beyond it. Maybe we should.
The film’s subject makes it bluntly political, yet Syriana nearly demands multiple viewings to even understand its plot, let alone its meanings. It is intended to illuminate that the business of oil is a dirty one, yet even people who pay close attention to the movie will come away from it more confused than enlightened.
It is, of course, bad form to kick M. Night Shyamalan when he’s down, but here goes.
What’s unfortunate about Michael Haneke’s Caché is that the writer/director has created a movie that requires such intensive decoding at its terminals that it’s easy to overlook the rest of the movie – to, in fact, miss its entire point. By spending so much time and effort on the beginning and the ending, we neglect essential questions: What is the film trying to say? Is this an effective way to communicate that message?
This is how closely I’ve been paying attention to the world: Sleater-Kinney, one of my favorite bands, announced in June that it was going on “indefinite hiatus,” and I finally figure it out in August.
In Calendar, writer/director Atom Egoyan offers a film version of musical minimalism, with its emphasis on long shots, repetition, and minor variation, and with just a handful of camera setups. Nothing is superfluous.
Mel Gibson’s second apology is, for the most part, a model for celebrity contrition. It does not obfuscate. It does not fail to admit the sin. It does not blame booze. Best of all, it does not implicitly fault those who were wronged (“I apologize to all those who [are so fucking stupid that they] might have been offended … ”). Instead, he owns up.
While holding his nose, Daniel Neman dares not call that which offends by its proper name. Instead, he dubs it a “flatulence joke.” And he is not amused.
Rolling Stone’s “Rock and Roll Daily” has started a series on double albums that can be (and should have been) pared down to single discs. And not just one 80-minute CD; the idea is to hack the bloated monster down to an LP.
Cinematical is was running a caption contest for this photo:
Alas, at the request of some evil movie studio, the photo has been replaced and the offered captions deleted.
