Rectify (Season 2, Ep. 2) The Evangelical Female in Her TV Habitat
In the first season of Rectify, Daniel Holden was released from death row to a town with differing opinions regarding his innocence. One of the more unexpected responses to this conundrum was that of...
View ArticleThe Leftovers (Season 1, Ep. 1) Not Surprised By Hope
“…hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.” (W. Brueggemann) –...
View ArticleA Few Things The 2014 Emmys Overlooked…
The Emmy Awards are weird for a few reasons. We know that the nomination and voting process makes any Emmy honor kind of dubious. The award exacerbates the age-old craft vs. popularity issue in...
View ArticleNothing Bad Can Happen (Gebbe, 2013)
Katrin Gebbe’s first feature, Nothing Bad Can Happen, quite impressively made it all the way to Cannes in 2013. It is a hard enough film to watch that it met with mixed reception. From reviews I...
View ArticlePasolini and St. Paul
Mubi has posted an excerpt from a translation of an unfilmed Pasolini script recently published by Verso Books. (Which, of great note, has a preface from Badiou and an introduction by Ward Blanton of...
View ArticleBest Films of 2014 So Far?
Here is a mid-year report (drawing from D’Angelo’s definitive list). There is a lot yet on the horizon this year, but I really enjoyed the following films and could imagine them jostling for...
View ArticleThe Strange Little Cat (Zürcher, 2013)
The youngest daughter in The Strange Little Cat is the nearest approximation to my seven year old daughter I have seen in cinema. Zürcher catalogs the little adult responsibilities she wants to...
View ArticleGrisgris (Haroun, 2013)
Gris Gris runs into a few issues in its third act, as the story seems to run out of steam. Also, its two leads remain pretty undeveloped throughout. But I want to get those criticisms out of the way so...
View ArticleThe Leftovers (Season 1, Ep. 3-6)
So far, The Leftovers has struggled to capitalize on the human scale of its Rapture narrative. The series has built up a few story arcs, spent a bit of time exploring the backstory of The Guilty...
View ArticleThe Leftovers (Season 1, Ep. 7-8) – The Problem With A Weak Apocalypse
Two of the show’s greatest Lindelofian mysteries have been resolved in the last few episodes of The Leftovers, but the now 3 1/2 year distance from the Departure itself indicates there is more to come....
View ArticleBrief Guide to British Crime Drama
All recent roads in crime drama lead to Forbrydelsen, the Danish series known to American audiences by its AMC then Netflix remake The Killing. For many, The Killing introduced a new vibe or set of...
View ArticleThe Leftovers (Season 1, Ep 9-10) False-Alarm Raptures
In 70s and early 80s, a small subculture of American kids shared a very odd and traumatic experience. This was the era of Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, which helped popularize the idea that a...
View ArticleBelieve Me (Bakke, 2014)
I don’t think I have ever bumped into a principle of sociology stated this way anywhere, but a subculture may be defined by its ability to mock itself. The defining characteristics of contemporary...
View ArticleThe Theory of Everything (Marsh, 2014)
The Theory of Everything is a film potentially about so much it runs into the problem of deciding what it has to say. The marriage of Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde is well publicized – the subject of...
View ArticleMe and You (Bertolucci, 2014 – SLIFF, 2014)
Me and You is a small and quiet return of Bertolucci to the festival circuit. It has been almost a decade since The Dreamers. The film is much less ambitious in scope than most of his prior work. As a...
View ArticleNorte, The End of History (Diaz, 2013)
In 1989, Fukuyama declared the “end of history” in the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Norte begins with a similar mouthful, kicked about by...
View ArticleA Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (Amirpour, 2014 – SLIFF, 2014)
I am not sure what A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night actually is. It emerges from the recent crop of vampire films cloaked in a lot of little genre hooks, but then defies easy description once fully...
View ArticleFavorite Films of 2014
It is that time of the year when with a heave and a sigh I launch my top ten list out among all the others, knowing that mere moments from clicking “publish” it will feel like a flimsy record of a...
View ArticleThe Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Takahata, 2014)
I watched this quiet miracle of a film recently with my daughter. We have been taking painting lessons together, learning how to blend color, the tonal habits of different brushes, and little...
View ArticleSelma (DuVernay, 2014)
There is a series of shots in Selma that called to mind a passage from Perez’s The Material Ghost. In this section, Perez is talking about the shot reverse shot convention. “The shot/reverse shot...
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