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 long snow-blanketed sidewalks; the high window-lights release into the flurries of the streets a quaint, fuzzy radiance that seems to beckon to those just arriving, hopping up the stairs with expectant laughter. The warmth of this bygone society is so quietly vigorous that one can feel it, emanating from an…
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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 something in the air, a vapor or an intoxicant, a poison maybe. While most narrative films, including those that are experimental, avant-garde, tend to exploit film as a visual medium, using dialogue as a supplement to the bread-and-butter of the cinema—the moving image—Waking Life emphasizes dialogue, which is so densely…
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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 and murdered. Unable to resist, Jerry asks to go along, hoping to get in a final evening of that old, glorious vigor of the chase, the crime, the resolution. With the murdered girl found in the snow begins the long and torturous demise of a once-competent detective, played by Jack…
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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 published as an addendum to his first aphoristic work, Human, All-Too-Human: Every military erected as a means of self-defense presupposes that those against whom the military has been erected (i.e. the other nations) are on the offensive, since no military would be erected for self-defense if there were nothing to…
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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 crisp static shots that populate the film—many of them drenched with a weak, almost weeping window light as though the sunlight itself were sad, broken-down—the director, Pawel Pawlikowski, found the right aesthetic evocative of a time palpably haunted by its past. But while the cinematography is as substantial as that…
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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 sound era, which was coming as the (apparent) demise of all that he had worked for. It was a heady, pressure-packed time in his life; and yet he managed to make this colorful circus film as authentic as any other Chaplin film, and moving in the vein of The Tramp,…
