Tuesday, February 3 2009
Rossellini and the Filter of Neo-Realism
These films flaunt their artifice and yet there are moments when something else emerges -- some rarefied emotion that we connect to reality.
Monday, February 2 2009
The New Golden Age of British TV Comedy
Every once in awhile, Britain rules over America. The Office, Spaced, Coupling and other British shows are gradually narrowing the Atlantic-sized gap between the United States and England.
Tuesday, January 13 2009
Off the Radar - The Top 30 DVDs of 2008
Oddly enough, while the major studios continue scratching their heads over how to sell yet another new format (Blu-ray) to disinterested consumers, several outside distributors made sure that this would be a digital year to remember.
Monday, January 12 2009
Back to Basics - The 30 Best TV Shows of 2008
The Year in TV was a lot like the US economy: struggling until summer and then tanking under the hope of a 2009 comeback. Still, our staff found 30 solid reasons to be cheerful come entertainment investment time.
Thursday, December 4 2008
Rambo: In All His Glory
Rambo is constantly portrayed as judge, jury, and executioner in the national and international spheres.
Tuesday, November 25 2008
The ‘Murderous’ Art of George Baselitz
For Baselitz, the true artist is the eternal outsider. While he leads a good bourgeois family life, at his art he becomes a murderer, a man on the fringes of good society, a destroyer.
Thursday, November 13 2008
Unchartered Territory: The Making of an Icon in The James Stewart Western Collection
As he headed westward in his films, a new, darker Jimmy Stewart helped redefine a genre.
Wednesday, November 12 2008
The Signal and the Violence of American Identity Politics
The oppressor in The Signal is an underlying, parental figure in absentia. It is industrial civilization as pathology, inextricably and somehow willfully divorced from reality.
Tuesday, November 11 2008
“To Be Happy in Your Own Life is All You Can Do”: An Interview with Wayne Coyne
It laboured for years in production, all while its lead actor was at the height of his drug addiction and the press grew wary of its many delays. Finally, the Flaming Lips' full-length film Christmas on Mars is seeing the light of day, and Wayne Coyne couldn't be happier to talk about it.
Thursday, October 16 2008
Cinema Qua Non - Indispensable DVDs: Part 3
Day Three - The final ten, a cross-culture collection teeming with big ideas, larger than life visions, and perhaps the greatest documentary on rugby you've probably never heard of.
Wednesday, October 15 2008
Bruce Nauman and The Art of Thinking
In Bruce Nauman's art no complacency is allowed to reside. The complacent can only flee.
Tuesday, October 14 2008
Cinema Qua Non - Indispensable DVDs: Part 2
Day Two - A demanding Decalogue overflowing with everything: from fascinating international fare, misbegotten masterworks, some out of the blue bafflers, and that seminal show about “nothing”.
Monday, October 13 2008
Cinema Qua Non - Indispensable DVDs: Part 1
Day One - A trip back to the classic days of studio system Hollywood, complete with great musicals, amazing adventure yarns, and a couple of post-modern freak outs, just to keep things controversial and lively.
Friday, September 26 2008
The Detective & His Reflections: The Shield: Sixth Season
The nihilistic, morally blurred world of The Shield reflects the inner workings of its characters.
Friday, August 29 2008
The Invaders: Cold War Central with the Vietnam Blues
The aliens carry silver dollars with lights which function both as cell phones and as gadgets that can make anyone drop dead from an instantly diagnosable "brain hemorrhage".
Friday, August 22 2008
Yukio Mishima, of Love and Death
Death and sex were verboten, and Mishima took it upon himself to be a virtuosic provocateur; part passionate expressive modernist, part fervent traditionalist.
Wednesday, August 20 2008
Brighton Wok: The Legend of Ganja Boxing
Brighton Wok is England’s first marijuana Kung-Fu movie. You get the bong, I’ll get the nachos.
Thursday, August 14 2008
A Fairy Tale Childhood: An Interview with Guy Maddin
The Canadian cult director talks to PopMatters about family, childhood, memory and his cinematic Gesamptkunstwerks that often look like damaged artifacts dredged up from an archive of lost 1920s and '30s film.
Life Into Art: Strange Culture and the Measure of Documentary Film
Strange Culture is a critical entry point into the current discussion of what makes a documentary a documentary, most notably because it announces its own subjectivity in a clear and provocative way.
Thursday, June 19 2008
The Technology of the Occult: Méliès and the Invention of Film
Like any illusionist, Méliès created wonderment with only the slightest of pretense, creating a filmic language that continues to be explored and exploited today.
