I do my very best to see all the movies.
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Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song 1971
I agree with Roger Ebert that Sweet Sweetback's Badass Song isn't an exploitation film despite its lurid sexuality, unabashed violence and anti-authority narrative. Van Peebles' diverse banquet of troubling underage material, avante garde cinematic expression, and picaresque folk narrative deserves to be analyzed more as an enduring archetype of legend manifested in the collective American unconscious, than the admirable and envied stereotype Sweetback ultimately endured as in his respective genre pantheon; the latter succeeded in its subconscious impact upon those…
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Daisies 1966
I'm either losing my mind from watching too many movies and reading too much into occult magic...or cinema truly is an art medium full of ancient story telling traditions, symbols of humanity's recurring struggles and existential themes that mark the limits of our shared experience.
My first few experiences with the alchemical duality of cinema come from Bergman's Persona, and his more obvious The Magician; more recently, my long, drowsy traipsing through Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating, provided a…
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Q: Into the Storm 2021
A sobering work of investigative journalism, Q: Into the Storm breathed some hope into my taste for modern documentaries. Although procedurally quite fair to its subjects, the film can feel a bit of a puff-piece to some incorrigible folks; clearly Mr. Cullen trusts his audiences to form their own opinions about the twisted subject-jesters that love to dance in the dark muck of the DMZ between free speech and words of violent incitement.
Why is the film successful then, in…
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Cure 1997
It takes a certain type of big brain MF to confidently blend the voyeuristic tension of Hitchcock, the Jungian Shadow logic of Lynch and the dilapidated-house-as-poetic-conceit-of-the-soul metaphor of Andy Tarko into a still somehow thrilling neo noir that consistently defies its own genre, still playing only by its finest beats.
The Kurosawateur that isn't named Akira, might just be that MF. His exceptional, indefinable landmark horror film Cure wouldn't have grazed my retinas but for our quirky little LB community;…
