7 years ago
All posts by Jake Cole
Spotlight on Fandor: “Meek’s Cutoff”
Westerns as diverse as High Plains Drifter and Johnny Guitar have portrayed the Old West as a great conflagration—a hell of scorched land and inhospitable, forgotten souls. Meek’s Cutoff, on the other hand, presents the West as purgatory—a bleached-out void wh...
Read more →
“The Divergent Series: Insurgent”
The Divergent Series: Insurgent is so unmemorable that its long-winded, SEO-boosting title becomes a helpful marker for keeping track of what it is you’re watching. The film begins with more “previously on” summary than a late episode of Lost, but even the con...
Read more →
Spotlight on Fandor: “The Marquise of O”
Eric Rohmer’s penchant for neorealist romantic comedies did not preclude the occasional aesthetic experiment. His Perceval le Gallois (1978), for example, remains one of the most startlingly experimental features of the 1970s, pushing realism into the realm of...
Read more →
“Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter”
The first image of David Zellner’s Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter is not its own. Rather, it is the opening text—a wry “true story” disclaimer filtered through the fuzzy distortion of a worn VHS—from the Coen brothers’ Fargo. The analog snow and intense tracking,...
Read more →
Spotlight on Fandor: “35 Shots of Rum”
Claire Denis upends two overused household tropes with her most elegiac feature, 35 Shots of Rum, with her acute eye for humane detail. First, she avoids the depiction of domestic spaces as consumerist prisons that place traps on everyone (especially women) wi...
Read more →
Of Tramps and Men: Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” at 75
Naturally, the first joke in Charlie Chaplin’s first true sound film is silent. The Great Dictator (1940), the filmmaker’s (in)famous takedown of Adolf Hitler at the height of America’s non-interventionist stance on World War II, opens with a disclaimer that m...
Read more →
“CHAPPiE”
If Bono directed films, he’d be Neill Blomkamp. His features smugly denounce the ruination of class and racial conflicts while nonetheless seeking easy refuge in clichéd, half-sketched images of said conflicts for the sake of drama. Everyone mocks Elysium and ...
Read more →
Spotlight on Fandor: “Green”
Men dominate the first scene of Green, in which journalist Sebastian (Lawrence Michael Levine) and his friend (Alex Ross Perry) pompously extol the virtues of Philip Roth, engaging in a game of one-upmanship to see who can concoct the most effusive praise. Yet...
Read more →
Spotlight on Fandor: Derek Jarman’s “Wittgenstein”
Wittgenstein introduces the Austrian-British philosopher as a boy (Clancy Chassay) sitting at a table, jotting down a note. “If people did not sometimes do silly things,” the lad says haltingly as he scribbles along, “nothing intelligent would ever get done.” ...
Read more →
Spotlight on Fandor: Joanna Hogg’s “Exhibition”
The modernist house where artists D (Viv Albertine) and H (Liam Gillick) live in Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition recalls the politician’s retreat in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer. Imposing metal and wall-length windows gives the impression of simultaneous transpa...
Read more →