Gus Van Sant’s latest film, Paranoid Park, tells the story of Portland skater kid named Alex who is somehow involved in the accidental death of a rail yard employee. Van Sant adapted the screenplay from a young adult novel, which leads to an interesting fusion of Van Sant’s recent minimalist masterpieces with a more conventional mystery-driven narrative. [Read more →]
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If you stop and think about it for a second, Werner Herzog and Antarctica are a strong fit. Both are complex, aloof and mysterious, isolated by their stark individuality and near-mythological auras. They’re vast and unknowable. So, in retrospect, it was probably only a matter of time before the enigmatic, contemplative director of would find himself traveling to the bottom of the world, looking for answers to questions only he really understands. [Read more →]
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The first thing that comes to mind when I think about the Newberry winning childhood classic, The Giver, is the controversy it engendered. [Read more →]
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Roman Polanski has always been a fragmented persona in the sense that there’s always seemed to be more than one of him. There’s Polanski the survivor, the man who lived through the Holocaust and the brutal murder of his beautiful wife, Sharon Tate, and their unborn child. There’s Polanksi the pedophile, the disturbed sexual predator of young girls who escaped his fate and fled to Paris. And then there’s Polanksi the maddeningly talented director, responsible for such iconic films as Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby. He’s a different man to different people, so it comes as a moderate disappointment that a documentary devoted to him gets so caught up in the details of the media circus surrounding his statutory rape trial in 1977 that it loses sight of its own subject and his many personas. Again, it seems, circumstance and speculation supersedes the enduring question of just who Roman Polanski really is. [Read more →]
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Almost every film released these days seems to come prefaced by months of hype, excessive product placements and tie-ins, and expectations that few films can hope to live up to. But every so often, a small little film will bubble up through the surface and manage to satisfy filmgoers in a way that most of the blockbusters fail to achieve. Last year, that film was called Once. This year, it was The Visitor, Thomas McCarthy’s long-awaited follow-up to 2003’s The Station Agent. And while so many fledgling writer/directors seem to be one-trick ponies, McCarthy managed not only to prove he’s no fluke, but for me, managed to surpass the debut film. [Read more →]
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I’ll be honest: when I first heard about Swingtown, I was a bit leery. CBS, home of stodgy procedurals and boring sitcoms, is not the place to look if you like your television even remotely challenging. And given the subject matter, it seemed more at home a cable network. But the cast drew me in – both Jack Davenport and Molly Parker have been award-worthy in other television projects (Coupling and Deadwood respectively) and both seemed quite comfortable in tackling (taboo) sex as a subject matter (Coupling was basically a sex farce; Parker’s breakthrough role was as a necropheliac in Kissed). So I was persuaded into giving it a shot, keeping my expectations in check.
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By Sanny and Above the Title (Rachel)
Spoilers ahoy! Do not read if you want to see the movie with fresh eyes!!!
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Culturegeek and shazzerwise stroll through the bucolic surroundings of Powell and Pressburger in their discussion of A Canterbury Tale
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