Mirror: Motion Picture Commentary

django I’m off to focus on my own films now. Here is my last post, my thoughts on Django, completely unedited. This is what something I write looks like before it’s anywhere close to being finished. Before I’ve toned it wayyy down or toned it way up, all out of order etc. I better get out of here before I start making disclaimers up the wazoo. *** Blood is so red. Thank god for its color. Thank god for blood’s redness and thank god for red blood in Django. In January. Its good to see guts in the wastelands of winter. In winter, the exteriors of everything rub on the exteriors of everything else. Coats pass other coats. Gloves shake […]

chancha Today at Sundance I wandered aimlessly around a supermarket picking up different cheeses and putting them back down. I can never decide on a brie. Cheese-less I journeyed to a bustling main street (a very steep hill) where altitude-acclimated rich ladies breezed by me in furry hats and sunglasses. They were having a good time. Having spent a terrifying night gasping for air in Cuajimoloyas, Mexico (10,000 ft. elevation), I rang Doctor Singla. “Doc, I need some altitude sickness meds” I said, but before she could reply the call disconnected. Dejected on Main Street with only a tidbit of oxygen left in my lungs, I glanced up. There, between me and death, was a coffee shop. Then I drank […]

method A Dangerous Method opens with the ominous notes of a cello, that, leading out of the opening credits, give way to a horn & string crescendo and the disturbing first scene: Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) arrives screaming, restrained by men, in a black carriage, drawn by black horses at the Burgholzli Clinic. And as our stomachs vibrate from the bass and the violence of the scene just past, a calm Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) greets his new patient in a beige paneled room with dark parquet floors and bounced light. This is Zurich. It is 1904. Sabina suffers from mental hysteria (with spontaneous orgasms provoked by humiliation). She and Jung eventually begin a sexual relationship. In these early meetings between […]

marlene How can I communicate the importance of a film without one dimensionalizing it and destroying its magic? I don’t know. I never want to discuss cinema in a leaden and academic way, but what other way is taken seriously? Emotional discussion of film is often dismissed as juvenile, and this is unfortunate, but also strange. I have no interest in seeking objectivity through art, and since our idea of the objective in regards to art criticism means “from a white, male perspective”, it has no interest in me either. Now, let me make this very clear, because there seems to be a little confusion: This is not a blog about race, and it is not a blog about gender. It […]

drive I am an extremely quiet person, and since quiet constitutions are often regarded with suspicion, I appreciate films with extremely quiet heroes. The quiet is what I admired most about Drive, at first. There is restraint in dialogue, and stillness in composition. Even Ryan Gosling’s facial features, unusually petite, restrain themselves from reaching a size better fitting the large plane of his face (it takes one big face to know another). And out of Gosling’s very little mouth comes a very little voice, that says… very little. This muted calm, despite bursts of gory violence, is Drive’s greatest strength. Director Nicolas Winding Refn creates a persistant monotone mood consistent with lifetime long depression or certain drugs, and in this sleepy way […]

streets On Saturday nights in 1993, the TNT television channel played science fiction movies back to back beginning at midnight. They called this the TNT “Monster Movie Marathon.” As my parents had recently divorced, my sister and I now spent weekends at my father’s house and the Saturday night Monster Movie Marathon quickly became our tradition. We made our bed on the living room floor and taped each movie on the VCR. Them! was a favorite, as was The Day the Earth Stood Still. The Thing, both the 1951 version and John Carpenter’s became beloved, as did The Day of the Triffids and Cronenberg’s The Fly. When I think of great science fiction now, these are a few of the […]

motherhood I became aware of my mortality before we had a dining room table. I don’t recall the exact age, I only know the arrangement of furniture, and the dining room then was just an empty space to play in. I can tell you that I was five or six and no older than that. Six however is a world apart from five when you’ve only existed on earth for that many years. And this must have had something to do with it; the realization of how long I had existed. To realize your existence is to also become suddenly aware of how long you have not existed. Of course I had not existed for billions of years before my […]