'I am the Wrath of God! The earth I walk upon sees me and quakes.'
~ Lope de Aguirre in "Aguirre, the Wrath of God."
This proclamation is spoken by an individual who remains a cinematic paragon of mere mortals overreaching in their fanatical folly, causing suffering and hardship for those coerced into following a dictator’s crazed reveries. Aguirre (played by Klaus Kinski) is one of the Spanish conquistadors on this 16th century mission traversing through the acidic soils of…
The physiognomy of the Bruno S character is that of a special soul and thus, too, the actor portraying the role must also be a special soul, for Werner Herzog’s "Stroszek" deftly blurs the boundaries separating fact and fiction. The actors in the movie are playing a version of themselves, perhaps idealised but then again the viewer is not privy to their personal lives in the way a famous movie star’s private sphere could be accessed by the media. When…
It may only be a matter of time before sensitivity readers vet their way through the complete works of Agatha Christie and, for what it is worth, I ponder how many lines of dialogue in Billy Wilder's adaptation of Christie's "Witness for the Prosecution" might be threatened by the equivalent gatekeepers of sensitive viewing. One cannot watch the film without noticing occasional disparaging and offensive references to the nation of Germany and its citizens, and more frequently a palpable bias…
‘With their frankly uterine shapes and vulviform glass doors,’ propagates theorist Helen Robbins about the pods of this scientist's teleportation device, they are ‘clear womb simulacra.’ I have heard many put forth the analogy that writing a novel is the closest someone without a vaginal opening can come to giving birth: you conceive the idea, you nourish it for months and, without an epidural aid, you finally find the strength to release your baby into the world. Once delivered, you…
In-the-zone (adjective) : in a mental state of focused concentration on the performance of an activity, in which one dissociates oneself from distracting or irrelevant aspects of one’s own environment.
The Zone is the destination for these figures, serving as a site of potential promise for those civilians hopelessly dissatisfied with their environment. This abandoned, quarantined venue is fraught with danger and uncertainty; they who have passed into its realm have rarely returned to reveal the secrets of their unique…
On the sixth day God created mankind, but why was he having such a bad day refining his cosmos? Before the homecoming queen picture frame of murdered school girl Laura Palmer rigidly remained counteracting the infected lives of a "Twin Peaks" community supplanted by evil, David Lynch opened (and closed) his version of "The Elephant Man" with a photographic image of the eponymous figure's mother. She had the face of an angel, this son remarks to a listener. He laments…
