Hooptober 4.0 - 2017 - Film #30
Stalin, Eisenstein and Romero are seated in a drawing room on plush leather armchairs. They are enjoying cognac around the hearth of an open fire. They make small talk about the hoof and mouth disease epidemic in California, the Olympics in Paris and how absurd and profound Dada truly is.
Stalin narrows the conversation down to business, "Mr. Romero, I am very pleased to have you join our film program. It is my…
Spanish hunters are exceedingly cruel. Once they have decided that a hunting dog is no longer fit for active duty they string him up by the neck from a tree branch and watch him slowly strangulate to death. While they watch his paws kick at the air in a death dance of sheer panic they laugh in bemusement. The hunters call this "playing the piano" as though the dogs are tapping out their own funeral dirge…
When I started watching this I had an uneasy feeling that Jarnusch had some kind of eerie preternatural premonition of the pandemic. It was spooky how much it could be read as an allegory for something that no one had an inking of at the time of production. But then it evolved into a goofy deadpan (or should that be undeadpan?) farce that I just fell into a groove with and my anxiety gave way to curiosity. This films somehow…
Such a sordid story. I was such an incurable romantic when I was a teenager. When this movie was released I was 18 years old. It was the year I started dating my wife and I have been with her ever since. As such, Sebastian and Katherine horrified me as characters. Not so much because I found them dispicable and immoral but because there was always a fear in the back of my mind that everything I thought was important…
Thanatos, Eros and the Art of Zen - Japanese Erotic Cinema Project - #1
I went to see this film at the cinema on my own. Nobody else could go but I wanted to anyway because I am precipitously dementing into a Sion Sono fan. And it has the word porno in the title, so there is that.
There was a lesbian couple sitting next to me. It doesnt matter that they were lesbians. But with the same sex marriage…
Everything I love about cinema started right there in the 1890s. The Lumière Brothers started a long tradition of realism, capturing life on camera and providing a snapshot of different times, people and places. In extension of this, Alice Guy-Blache utilised this new mass media to reach out and engage broad audiences in social commentary and make…
