As directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Trouble in Paradise raises an important question: if the entire milieu in which he finds himself is one steeped in suavity, refinement, the old-world elegance of the jet-setting crowd, what are the limits of a man’s suavity? Surely you can only become so refined and smooth-talking before you simply refine yourself out of reality, like a pencil sharpened to a nub. To...
It was just over a decade ago that the young American actor Jeremy Piven had a run-in with mercury poisoning. It must have been a low blow. After getting roles in such touchstones of culture as Seinfeld and Entourage and establishing his renown as an actor of worth and substance in the vast and glittering landscape of film and television, he was appearing on Broadway in 2008 in a revival of Speed...
For a philosopher with a reputation that tends to be pooh-poohed as excessively gloomy and pessimistic, Schopenhauer and his posthumous popularity find no respite in one incident that occurred in the year 1821, when he was staying in his lodgings in Berlin. A young and brilliant man then in his thirties, with a spitfire’s outlook and the temperament of a boiling kettle, he ran up against...
The luminous and streaky light rippling in the waters of the Inland Sea has the subtle power of a desert mirage. Pellucid like those of an atoll or a sea-green lagoon, these waters fill up an internal space connecting the Pacific Ocean with the Sea of Japan, also making possible the shipping industry integral to an island nation that until the nineteenth century was closed to the world. It hid...
I’m not sure that the wry and half-baked experimentation of Alain Resnais’ movie, Mon oncle d’Amérique, succeeds according to the lavish praise heaped on it by its receptive critics in 1980, the year of its release in France. It is an uneven movie that becomes more and more questionable as the story advances, its deadening thud timed to the smarmy interludes of its clean-cut figure of authority...
It can be interesting to think that the fortuity of your birth and the socio-economic circumstances foisted on you from the first are so decisive and for some so life-ending and catastrophic. Some people seem to strike gold out of the womb and enjoy the benefits of a lavish lifestyle, a wealthy family, and all the assets of the developed world; others find themselves in an immediate hailstorm of...
A part of the creative artist that tends to be as inseparable from his work as from his personality and character, a certain egotism often comes with the territory. Immersed in the creative process and the material of her work, drawing from the murkiest depths of her mind as a creator, she finds herself face to face with a creative legacy teetering on the ledge of absolute oblivion but with the...
It is in the bubbling turmoil of the burned-out banlieues of Paris that the feelings of its characters and of their apparent oppressors become clear. But La Haine distills these feelings into a curt and undeniable one-word message, played out during something less than twenty-four hours on the streets: hate. This is the takeaway that the moral center of the film, Hubert, describes in a recurring...
About the smooth-flowing tracking shots inside what appears to be a seamy and enchanted grotto, with all the buttery and naked flesh that accumulates in this kind of establishment, not much need be said. Sumptuous and apparently sexy—it was first marketed as a titillating thriller—Exotica takes on the suggestive challenge of a strip club and all its associated stereotypes and layers its script...
It is said that great art often contains an element of contextual weirdness, a bit of the outré or taboo that contributes to a lasting impression that remains with us for years, even for a lifetime. If such an adage is true, then Léolo, a film directed by the meteoric filmmaker Jean-Claude Lauzon, endures in the cinematic annals as a masterwork of the very kind. The narration in voiceover is that...