Category: 1980s Cinema
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The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986)
Easily among the slowest of them all. Tarkovsky’s films are few, and it’s fairly easy to mark out their shared formal features and formal progress. As long as Andrei Rublev is, its pacing doesn’t feel as slow as Stalker, Nostalghia, and The Sacrifice, the last of which plods along particularly monotonously on account of looming narrative questions during its first…
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Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
The opening credits sequence is all slow-mo, glorying in a static frame long shot of LaMotta warming up in the ring alone, distanced but surrounded by spectators. Occasional flashes of diegetic photography punctuate the image. The bold, overt shot (uninterrupted save for the flashes?), set to orchestral music, sets the film apart from sports…
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The Shining: Sundry Thoughts
The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980) – Even just the abstracts of the “interpretations” that have been performed on this film are exhausting. (And note well: these are performances.) Some of them embody everything that’s wrong with academia, what with those deconstructive and reconstructive critical analyses that turn out to bear very little, if any, resemblance to the…
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Catch-Up, cont’d: 11/2012-12/2012
Skyfall (dir. Sam Mendes, 2012) – Really want/need to see it again, but here’s the first of the Craig-era Bond films that tries to get away from the Bourne legacy (as it were). Major shift in narrative gears here, with Bond’s role as protector of the maternal figure he had previously been defying. He’s no…
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Catch-Up: 10/2012 – 11/2012
We’ll see how this goes. It’s going to start as a list, with attempts to fill in the space between titles with whatever jumps to memory. All About My Mother (Todo Sobre Mi Madre) (dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 1999) – Another one for film & melodrama. Did a scene analysis of the sequence wherein Manuela transitions…
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Viewing Log, Week of 9/23/2012
Nashville (dir. Robert Altman, 1975) – Amazing how much you can forget about a film in five days. Nashville came across as so much more scathing this time around than last time (around 4 years ago). The attention Altman pays to the triumphalistic attitude of nationalism that defines his vision of the South in the…
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Viewing Log, Week of 9/9/2012
Albatross (dir. Niall MacCormick, 2011) – An “independent,” acting-driven story about how “coming of age” is accompanied by lots of challenges, although these challenges seem quite avoidable and fairly atypical. This is all story, and it doesn’t know where its sympathies lie. Boogie Woogie (dir. Duncan Ward, 2009) – Anything that mocks the upper-class art…
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Quickies, Vol. XXXI
The Double Life of Véronique (1991, dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski) – A film that continues to challenge and provoke. Struck this time around by the very immanent nature of Kieslowski’s transcendence. Zizek thinks Kieslowski finds “God” a cosmic sadist (to use C.S. Lewis’ term), a rather mean child who toys with his creation for his own…
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The Purple Rose of Cairo: Subverting Cinema
It was awhile ago when we watched this one, which came via the lovely Netflix Instant feature streaming via Nintendo Wii. (Somewhere Jack Donaghy is drooling over the synergy.) So, the screenshots here will undoubtedly be inferior to the norm. Needing a little refresher, enlisted the assistance of Arnold W. Preussner, whose helpful article “Woody…
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Quickies, Vol. XXIX: Fantasies
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1977) – At this point, Spielberg hadn’t quite mastered his balance between grand scope and human interest; it’s overly big with not enough emphasis on the small. It’s good and well to offer a regular joe as your main protagonist, but don’t dwarf him too much.…
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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: New Testament Imagery
Precious Bodily Fluids 