7 years ago
All posts by Jake Cole
Blu-ray Review: “42nd Street”
Movies about backstage drama tend to fall into one of two emotional categories: awestruck wonder and cynical self-martyrdom. Classic behind-the-scenes melodramas and comedies burst with the joy of being in a boom industry in which even the most nobly starving ...
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Spotlight on Fandor: “Miami Connection”
To reword Leo Tolstoy, sometimes it feels as if all good movies (at least as they are typically defined by the mainstream) are all alike. But bad films, truly bad, haphazard, baffling films, are bad in their own special way. A pall of irony hangs over the embr...
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Spotlight on Fandor: “Millennium Mambo”
The opening Steadicam shot of Millennium Mambo--of a young woman, Vicky (Shu Qi) skipping down a fluorescent-lit tunnel--is so distorted by slow-motion and a nostalgic voiceover that the scene comes to resemble a journey through a wormhole, a movement in dista...
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The Criterion Collection: “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”
Robert Mitchum always had a sluggish, loping gait, but in his prime, it suggested laconic virility and unsettling patience. However, when he enters The Friends of Eddie Coyle in a gray frame, wearing a gray suit and sporting gray hair and gray skin, the actor’...
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Spotlight on Fandor: “Stop Making Sense”
For all its formal inventiveness and the quality of its subject, the band Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense may be the best concert film of all time because it actually tells a story. It begins with art rock overlord David Byrne wandering out alone on a stage t...
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On Johnnie To At Age 60
Today marks the 60th birthday of the world’s most exciting filmmaker, Johnnie To. The Hong Kong master enters his seventh decade more popular than ever, riding a wave of critical support with Drug War, his first film released in the West in years, as well as e...
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Spotlight on Fandor: “Mikey and Nicky”
Mikey and Nicky certainly resembles a New Hollywood-era feature, with its time-worn earthen colors, drab lighting, and fidgety cameras. But as with the rest of Elaine May’s criminally small filmography, the film’s sense of humor is shockingly modern. Indeed, t...
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“Rebels of the Neon God”
It’s a testament to the audacity and divisiveness of director Tsai Ming-liang that the feature debut from the painterly master of Taiwan’s post-New Wave era, Rebels of the Neon God, should get its first limited release in the States 22 years after it was made....
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Spotlight on Fandor: “Instrument”
If Fugazi were the defining post-hardcore band, collecting the shards of numerous dead-end underground sub-movements back into a unified contradiction of melody and abrasion, then Jem Cohen’s Instrument is the defining post-hardcore film. Visible film strips a...
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Spotlight on Fandor: “Stroszek”
I wanted to pick a funny film for this week’s post-April Fool’s Fandor spotlight, and I don’t know what it says about me that I immediately gravitated to Werner Herzog’s demented, bleak Stroszek. Though set in the then-present 1970s, the film would make an eas...
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