Long Pauses

Category: Film

  • My Summer of Love

    My Summer of Love

    My Summer of Love received a lot of “buzz,” as they say, in Toronto, and I would guess that most of it was generated by Press’s performance, which is a lot of fun to watch.

  • Nobody Knows (2004)

    Nobody Knows (2004)

    After Life is one of my favorite films of the past five years, so for that reason alone, I was very much looking forward to Kore-eda’s latest, Nobody Knows, the story of four young siblings whose mother abandons them to find work in another city.

  • TIFF Film Schedule

    TIFF Film Schedule

    I’ve put in my ticket requests for the Toronto Film Festival. By choosing to fly in on the 11th and out on the 18th, I’ll be missing two of my most highly anticipated films, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, which will be introduced by Chantal Akerman and which I’ve always wanted to see on the big screen, and Godard’s latest, Notre Musique.

  • Motion Pictures During World War I and II

    Motion Pictures During World War I and II

    Note: Writing an entry for an encyclopedia intended for high school and college libraries, as it turns out, is a lot like writing an undergraduate research paper: the concerns seem to be quantity rather than quality, breadth rather than depth. I found the process more than a bit maddening.

  • Arthur Miller, Then and Now

    Arthur Miller, Then and Now

    No new Cine Club notes this week, as we decided spontaneously last night (and with mixed results) to watch John Huston’s The Misfits (1961). I love parts of the film — Thelma Ritter’s jokes and Montgomery Clift’s performance, in particular — and I think it’s a fascinating film to talk about.

  • Huh?

    Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner will rewrite Steven Spielberg’s untitled drama about the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics, where members of the Israeli team were held hostage and slain by Palestinian extremists.

  • Preach On

    “If cinema is merely an imposition of ideology, then, as a field of study, it is both a bore and a chore. There was a brief moment in my life when I viewed cinema solely through the lens of post-structuralism, but I realized that it was jeopardizing my love for the art. Call me naive, but I believe cinema, like other artforms, can still offer aesthetic experiences worthy of the search.” — EJ Park

  • Random Musings . . .

    Random Musings . . .

    On some recent viewings . . . Shame (Bergman, 1968) — Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow star as Eva and Jan Rosenberg, cultured musicians who escape to a rural island when their orchestra is shut down during a war. Their new, more simple life as farmers is soon interrupted when their home is invaded, […]

  • The New Cine

    I’m pleased to announce Cine Club, a new group blog that I hope will evolve in interesting ways. In the spirit of Andre Bazin and Francois Truffaut, I recently began hosting weekly film viewings with a small group of friends.

  • The New American Old West: Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms

    The New American Old West: Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

  • TIFF

    I’ve purchased my airfare. Any advice for a first-time visitor to the Toronto International Film Festival?

  • Hour of the Wolf (1968)

    Hour of the Wolf (1968)

    Hour of the Wolf is Ingmar Bergman’s vampire film. Let me repeat that: Hour of the Wolf (1968) is Ingmar Bergman’s vampire film.

  • Fahrenheit 9/11

    Fahrenheit 9/11

    Like millions of others, I lined up this weekend to see Fahrenheit 9/11.

  • Damnation (1988)

    Damnation (1988)

    Would Tarkovsky’s style, siphoned through another imagination, produce a similar effect? Would any of that strange poetic logic survive the translation? Béla Tarr’s Damnation makes for an interesting case study.

  • The Masters of Cinema Series

    I’ve been trading emails with Doug, Trond, and Nick for years now, so I couldn’t be happier to see them entering the DVD production business, even if only tangentially. The Masters of Cinema Series will, no doubt, be a gift to all of us cinephiles. Cheers, guys.

  • The Great Divide

    I genuinely admire Jeffrey Overstreet for his willingness to write this stuff. I’m glad that someone is doing it. I’m even more glad that that someone ain’t me.

  • A (Very) Few Words on Twentynine Palms

    A much longer response is in the works.

  • A Scanner Darkly!

    “Linklater has kept the story dark, and haunted by rumors of God.” — Erik Davis at Boing Boing

  • Iron & Wine & Tarkovsky

    How strange. I just discovered that Sam Beam, of Iron and Wine, graduated from Florida State’s film school. As an alumnus of that program, my wife receives a monthly email notice, The Warren Report, that offers brief updates on the lives and careers of FSU filmmakers.

  • DVD Beaver Listserv Top 20

    DVD Beaver Listserv Top 20

    I’ve participated in the DVDBeaver listserv since its inception. Gary Tooze created the list when several of us who posted frequently in the Movies section of the Home Heater Forum decided that we needed a place to talk privately about foreign and art films. Here is a compiled list of our favorite films.

  • Late August, Early September (1998)

    Late August, Early September (1998)

    Like, one of Rohmer’s late comedies, the charm of Late August is found almost entirely in its characters (all of whom are likeable enough and three-dimensional enough) and in the smart things they say to one another. They twist themselves in existential knots, struggling to balance their idealized visions of integrity with the muddy necessity: compromise.

  • Dogville (2003)

    Dogville (2003)

    There’s little sense in writing about Dogville without discussing its final sequence, and there’s little sense in watching Dogville if you know how it ends.

  • Talkin’ About Movies

    Talkin’ About Movies

    Last night I delivered the following talk at the 2004 NEXUS Interdisciplinary Symposium: Reconstructing Theory and Value.

  • All Work and No Play

    Jon Ronson has been given permission to dig through the boxes that fill Kubrick’s Hertfordshire home — the lucky bastard — and he’s written about some of his findings.

  • Biskind Blows

    Via GreenCine Daily comes this link to Biskind Blows. I haven’t read Down and Dirty Pictures, and have no real desire to, but, based on others’ reports, I feel safe in assuming that my main beef with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls applies to his newer work as well.

  • Faith and Film

    After reading about it for the past few months, I found a copy of The Hidden God: Film and Faith on the new releases shelf of the university library during my lunch break today. Given the sensational coverage of film and faith in recent weeks, this collection of short essays is a breath of fresh air.

  • To Be Continued . . .

    A link to my profile of Hal Ashby at Senses of Cinema.

  • Great Directors: Hal Ashby

    Great Directors: Hal Ashby

    This essay was originally published at Senses of Cinema.

  • 2004 Film Diary

    2004 Film Diary

    A day-by-day viewing log of my filmwatching habits in 2004, beginning with Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1972) and ending with Brad Silberling’s Lemony Snicket (2003).

  • Best Films of 2003

    Best Films of 2003

    Living in Knoxville, Tennessee, with its two or three screens devoted to interesting fare, leaves me grossly ill-equipped to make sweeping generalizations about the year in film. The following, instead, is an odd mix of movies (or, more often, groups of movies) that I will probably forever associate with 2003.