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.
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?
A man’s hand holds a Polaroid photograph, but who would want to commemorate such a gruesome scene? The picture shows a body lying face-down on a floor, blood everywhere. This might be a crime-scene photo, but that conclusion doesn’t feel right.
As I predicted more than a year and a half ago, high-definition DVDs have flopped. That’s the premature but likely accurate conclusion of this editorial, which echoes some of my (18-month-old) comments and adds a few more nails.
What movie have you seen the most? What does it mean to you? That’s the premise of Slate’s puzzlingly titled “The Movie I’ve Seen the Most” from last week. Spike Lee offers West Side Story without explanation. Peter Farrelly says Something Wild.
At Scanners, Jim Emerson is running a series on the opening shots of movies. In his introduction, Emerson writes: “Any good movie – heck, even the occasional bad one – teaches you how to watch it. And that lesson usually starts with the very first image.”
In an aimless, nearly endless essay (more than 3,000 words), Wagstaff brings up some fascinating questions in what mostly functions as a personal remembrance of the circumstances of watching movies: “Most film criticism is rightly focused on the movie itself. The purpose of this essay is to clear a little spot of ground for the circumstances that surround watching a movie, the things that affect so strongly how we see it.”
Filmbrain raises an essential issue: “I have noticed a trend in the film blogosphere of critics who, while talented writers, are so damn clinical in their criticism that I find myself wondering if they actually enjoy film.”
At The House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz hosts a discussion on whether the new wave of grisly horror movies means something culturally, and what these films are saying.
A document of my film education and something that I hope will help guide people who are intimidated by the thousands of film books available – from omnibus guides to explorations of single works.
