In 'The Master,' P.T. Anderson investigates spirituality, but mostly human imperfection:
In Paul Thomas Anderson's new film, The Master, many of the themes of his older films return, this time to battle for the minds of 1950s America.
Bio: Ben Parker is a doctoral student of English literature at Columbia University. His Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account) also appear on his blog They Call Them Millions and on Twitter.
Does The Cause "work" for Freddie? Is there even a pragmatic value to the extensive working-over he receives, even if we set aside larger questions of truth? And if not, then what exactly is going on in the often-torturous, baiting, competitive dependency we see between Freddie and Dodd? Nothing healthy, certainly, but perhaps something necessary for both men. More
Postedsdf
on September 17th, 2012 6:13pmNow playing at the IFC Center after a Cannes premiere, it is a remake of the 1962 film Hara-Kiri, directed by Masaki Kobayashi (The Human Condition, Samurai Rebellion). Where the original has all the symbolic directness and tightness of stage drama, evoking Sophocles as much as Noh and kabuki theater, Miike's alterations to the story make moral and aesthetic nonsense out of the material. Miike clearly intends this remake of a Japanese arthouse classic to give a patina of improbable respectability to his career, like if Quentin Tarantino were to remake a Merchant Ivory picture. But instead of putting a decisive stamp on the material, or simply paying homage, Miike overwrites and muddies it. More
Postedsdf
on July 20th, 2012 4:12pmSteven Boone and Ben Parker on the last of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. More
Postedsdf
on July 20th, 2012 1:21pmNo one has ever wanted to be thought of as “cerebral” as much as the director of Memento and Inception. The Batman films that he's made have been less gimmicky in their convolutions—no dreams within dreams or backwards storytelling—attempting instead something on the scale of a Victor Hugo novel or Wagner opera. But along with that comes all the bombast and shallowness of a Hugo or a Wagner, with their addictions to backstory and exposition, tinny melodrama, and characters whose sole purpose is to advance a stalled plot. More
Postedsdf
on July 20th, 2012 12:55pm“The artist is present,” declares the title of the Marina Abramovic documentary also playing at Film Forum. The Battle of Algiers on the other hand, might fall under the directive “the artist is not present.” Absent are the “dialectical montage” and didactic rhythms of its silent-film forebears, Sergei Eisenstein's Strike and Battleship Potemkin, but also missing is the auteurist signature style that dominated Italian cinema of the sixties, whether Fellini's virtuosic choreography of six or eight people chattering, Antonioni's inexhaustibly attentive camera-eye, or Pasolini's projection of a hagiographic aura onto his rough subjects. Any such “vision” would be intrusive here. But this deletion of the auteur is not only a stylistic, but an absolutely political decision. More
Postedsdf
on July 9th, 2012 12:39pmMonstrously antifeminist, corny, and bloated (each episode is two hours long), it has all the intuitive appeal of the Holy Roman Empire. I've watched every minute of the last few seasons, including the spin-off "The Bachelorette"—even if this is only a little toe dipped into the sea of their twenty-three combined seasons. The show’s appeal is that most other reality TV offers up lives and locales (tattoo parlors, fashion designers, the mega-rich, the mega-fat, teen moms) that are hyperspecific and alien to most of us—while "The Bachelor," presenting head-on a dime-store romance set in exotic locales, lets slip through the High Definition cracks the grinding banality and burning humiliation of sharing oneself with another person. We all know these feelings. More
Postedsdf
on February 27th, 2012 1:26pm“Film noir” is an awkward genre. On one hand, its stylistic features are easily codified—a morally ambiguous hero caught in a bind, a femme fatale, labyrinthine flashbacks, and high-contrast black-and-white photography—prompting any number of homages and parodies, from Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. On the other hand, film noir is also something of a parasite, an atmosphere that invades otherwise innocent films and bends them to its generic will. Otto Preminger's Laura (1944) is one of the most beloved film noirs, not least because of its self-consciousness about the genre: is it a noir or a noir-ification of a gothic melodrama? More
Postedsdf
on January 3rd, 2012 9:37am
