Category Archive

I just finished watching a film by Hiroshi Teshigahara called Rikyu.  I liked it a great deal.  It’s about the last years of a tea master in late 16th c. Japan and how he came into conflict with the warlord that had held him in favor.   Read the rest of this entry »

Ignore, for the moment, that she’s 11.  Kids-as-killers is nothing new, especially if you’ve heard of films like Village of the Damned, Haneke’s recent The White Ribbon, Battle Royale, The Bad Seed, or any number of examples of Japanese animation.  A few years ago, I had the misfortune of watching a film called The Machine Girl, which was one of the goriest, most devoid-of-redeeming-value movie experiences I’ve ever had.  Sure, it’s more common for teenagers to be agents of destruction than pre-teens, but not unheard-of, especially among the critical establishment whose job is to be more familiar with these things than the rest of us amateurs.  While it’s worthwhile to debate whether or not it’s wrong to revel in the spectacle of a little girl dishing out gloriously exaggerated ultraviolence (which, in comparison to The Machine Girl, is the stuff of candy-colored Disney entertainment), the real reason that Hit Girl fails as a 21st century action heroine is far more basic. Read the rest of this entry »

I think that Big Hollywood is actually kind of cool in concept: the idea is to bring together a bunch of critics, artists, and journalists who are interested in film culture commentary from a conservative perspective.  It should be taken for granted that the vast majority of the major film criticism in the U.S. is dominated by critics whose political perspective is left-of-center.  It should also go without saying that being left-of-center isn’t a bad thing in the least (according to those Internet “Where Are You On the Political Axis?” tests, I’m left-of-center, which would probably surprise the hell out of my more liberal friends), but sometimes its a bit monotonous to read criticism by people who share a lot of the same basic premises.  There have been witty, intellectually vigorous conservative writers in the past; unfortunately, these days, most of them seem to tend to gravitate toward stock market advice columns or more direct political editorializing. Read the rest of this entry »

Steve P. continues his exhaustive Journey Through Kill Bill.  I really have nothing to add, since it really is exhaustive.

His post is a week old, but Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote a relatively brief appreciation of Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948) and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s 2002 remake.  I haven’t seen the remake — my knowledge of Chinese cinema is still severely limited — but I have seen the original, and it is a great example of what I can only call a perfect film. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the Question of the Day posed by MaryAnn Johanson, the Flick Filosopher.  She’s been writing intelligent, witty commentary for as long as I’ve been reading film criticism on the Internet (since the mid-90s or so), and it saddens me that she’s feeling depressed about her job prospects.  I don’t want an Internet without MaryAnn Johanson.  If a major trade publication like Variety doesn’t see economic sense in paying a full-time critic, there’s an even slimmer chance that freelancer/blogger like Johanson, even with syndicated reviews, can get by entirely on writing about movies.  Her worries about the shrinking audience for film criticism may be justified, but I found another of her thought threads even more potent.   Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, I feel like I should apologize for posting this so soon after another Armond White post, but my whole shtick of being an unapologetic Armond White whore would go out the window if I apologized.  So I won’t.  Nyah-nyah-nyah.

White wrote an incredibly concise and compelling article on March 3rd about how the Oscars are irrelevant.  One of his primary points was that Kathryn Bigelow is already an important, vital filmmaker whether or not she wins an Oscar.  He points out that she’s already worked her way into the pop lexicon by making films like Point Break, which obviously have some staying power, because filmmakers like Edgar Wright are referencing them with comprehension more than a decade later.

His observation that Hurt Locker “has gotten her heroized as an exceptional American female filmmaker through way-late feminism. The Hurt Locker lets the liberal media have both its Iraq War statement and female tokenism.”  I’m not sure how this meme evolved, but I guess it’s inevitable, considering the way the Academy tends to award its Oscars.  The conceit that the Oscars are a form of tokenism — politically convenient tools of recognizing career work, or perhaps a way of setting milestones, regardless of the quality of the work — has been around for years.  For months, it was suggested that Bigelow was likely to win best director by virtue of the fact that it’s high time that the Oscar go to a woman.  It was further suggested that this would undermine the actual merit of her work.  There’s logic in that. Read the rest of this entry »

Someone has finally gone to the trouble to help us compile an official list of every moron who wants Armond White “banned” from the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer.  Here are some nonrepresentative samples from the comments of people who support the petition. Read the rest of this entry »

“All of us who are keen on the history of film — and, I’d guess, some sane people as well…”

A few years ago, a friend of mine in college introduced me to Stanley Kauffmann,¹ longtime critic for The New Republic.  Though I’ve read a review of his from time to time, I never really made him a part of my regular routine.  What a dope I am.  Very recently, I borrowed Regarding Film from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s library.  Reading it was a breeze.  The volume (Kaufffmann’s seventh of film criticism) features selections that were written from about 1993 to 2000.  Reviews of films and books, plus a few obituaries, a lecture, and some other ruminations fill the relatively slim book.  Kauffmann writes with an air of casual authority: every assertion he makes seems full of a modest, yet intimidating store of knowledge and experience.  He’s not afraid to say that he hasn’t seen films, something more familiar to those of us who read (and/or are) amateur Internet bloggers, so when he discusses the work of a filmmaker like Abbas Kiarostami, Kauffmann readily admits that he’s only seen a nonrepresentative handful of the director’s oeuvre.  Yet he writes so lucidly and passionately about those films that he’s every bit the professional critic, if not a particular expert on the subject of Iranian cinema.  This revelation was an interesting contrast to the editorial in the recent issue of Cineaste (which, coincidentally, featured an illuminating interview with Kiarostami’s vaunted contemporary, Mohsen Makhmalbaf), in which the editor-in-chief asserted the necessity of expertise.  I’m still on the fence about where to mark a division between elitism and old-fashioned expertise.  I like the fact that the Web is full of amateurs who write about cinema purely because they love movies, and they are driven to communicate their feelings, even though there is no paycheck in it, and certainly no guarantee of much readership.  That unguarded ardor doesn’t destroy good criticism, it fuels it, if people aren’t too lazy to seek out the worthwhile voices amidst the din.  Professionalism isn’t delineated by employment, but by the rigor of the intellect and the craft of writing.  In any case, Kauffmann is a professional, a critic for more than fifty years.  (Wow.) Read the rest of this entry »