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Kurt Cobain strained to be understood on a frequency barely audible to most, and as enthusiasts and journalists superimposed their private impressions onto the official transcript of the nineties icon, the faint transmission of the self-proclaimed homesick Martian passed largely without notice. He died alone just as he lived, surrounded but isolated, listened [...]
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As Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights opens and closes, the same bluesy chorus purrs: “the story has been told before”. Clearly there is a higher significance to the lyric, in the way that it alludes to the recurrence of not merely prevailing themes of alienation and longing in Kar-Wai’s romantic canon, but of [...]
The following is some free-form ideas on what ‘art’ means in the context of film appreciation. It developed from various combative discussions regarding, of all things, the value of Iron Man. The hyperbole was coming from all ends and inevitably the ‘A’ word was unleashed and almost immediately took on a plethora of [...]
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‘I remember Hiroshima’
‘You remember nothing’
The seemingly unprovoked pang of despair, a curious phenomenon of heightened sensitivity not unlike what the Japanese refer to as ‘mono no aware’. I think of it as a sensation of rebooting in response to some unknown complication in the machinery of life. For me the pang consists [...]
How this glorious six minute clip escaped me for over year I do not know, but here is a rare deleted scene from Malick’s masterpiece. You will not find it on any dvd features, this youtube clip appears to come from an Academy screener. I suspect the motivation for cutting it from the [...]
Herzog, for me, serves as a signpost on the road to realization, his films and the mythology he works within, a kind of password to that half-remembered clarity lately lacking in my aesthetic life. I can hypnotize myself if only for a short while whenever I take on one of his captured dreams and [...]
The following mixtape is all about the art of repurposing, taking songs which although to my knowledge have been overlooked in popular soundtracks nonetheless possess an allure of the cinematic about them waiting to be explored. These are the same familiar songs we hear playing in the background of a party or a department [...]
Having spent last year watching most of the spine titles 1-101 (‘The Passion of Joan of Arc’ and ‘Carnival of Souls’ still pending), I am now ready to start with the next batch. First a few remarks on discoveries from the first 100:
Henri-Georges Clouzot’s ‘Diabolique’: I enjoyed the hell out of this film, and [...]
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Tonight I had the opportunity to catch a first glimpse of Fernando Meirelles’ rough cut of ‘Blindness’, a film adapted from the best-selling novel of Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author José Saramago, and starring such heavies as Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal and Danny Glover. It is a film whose pedigree clearly [...]
My best of list for 2007, taking into consideration that it was within this calendar year that I saw these films (some may have opened outside of this time frame) and that I select according to the degree with which I was personally affected by the work, factoring in secondarily the particular ‘cinematic’ significance of [...]
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