On a quiet, snowy winter evening in the city of Dublin, just after the turn of the century, a horse-drawn carriage bearing revelers for the feast day of Epiphany clatters up to a modest, homey townhouse whose upper floors have already begun stirring in the darkness, like a beacon of storms. Lighted lamps stand outside, burning steadily and dotting the…
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In the cinematic hub of Austin, Texas, home to a reputable university, shortly after the turn-of-the-century and the disaster of September 11th, Waking Life plays out its enthralling rotoscope dreamland with what seems like a disordered, chaotic flurry of dialogues. It is all very unremitting—loquacious, academic fuzziness, street-talk and bone-dry theory rattled off as though it were the effluvia of…
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A grizzled, weather-beaten retiree and once a police detective in a hinterland of Nevada, Jerry Black is on the cusp of life-changing events. On the night of his surprise retirement party, his replacement (played by Aaron Eckhart with a clean-shaven, big-chinned impudence) leaves the party on a call—a girl, found in a snowy woodland earlier that day, has been raped…
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“Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared—this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth too.”–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow The hypocrisy of the current military strategy of all nations was pointed out by Friedrich Nietzsche as early as 1880, when The Wanderer and His Shadow was…
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Its frames a cold, beautiful black-and-white, squaring its aesthetic with the drained and spare post-war environment of the Polish People’s Republic, Ida is a stunningly lucid film. Its story, set in the 1960s, is a variation on the theme of the Holocaust as its shadows lingered over the decades that came after it. With the draining of colors and the…
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Charlie Chaplin, the director of his mid-career film The Circus, was a libertine and a rake. A diminutive ladies’ man, he was having multiple affairs as the film was in production, going through a divorce settlement with his underage wife, and facing back taxes totaling six or seven figures. He was also at odds with the inevitable avalanche of the…