8 years ago
Anniversary (10 posts found)
“Re-Animator” At 30
In his book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Jonathan Glover discusses what he calls "the cold joke”—wringing humor out of a lack of respect for human life—as a method people often use to distance themselves from atrocities they partake in, ...
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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...
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“The Breakfast Club” at 30
The jock. The princess. The nerd. The rebel. The loner.
Brought together by circumstance, in detention for a full Saturday in Chicago, these five high schoolers are not strangers, but they do represent wholly different worlds. They come from different place...
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A Reel Boy: “Pinocchio” at 75
A solitary old man lives in an Italian village, spending his waking hours working on all manner of wooden creations, from cuckoo clocks to marionettes. He is awash in loneliness, maintaining relationships with his pet goldfish and cat, the latter of whom he no...
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Outback Antonioni: “Picnic at Hanging Rock” at 40
“Only a million years ago,” a teacher says of the formation of the eponymous landmark of Picnic at Hanging Rock as she escorts schoolgirls there on a field trip. Like that mass of volcanic stone, Peter Weir’s 40-year-old film is relatively young, yet it presen...
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Time After TIme: Looking Back at “Before Sunrise”
When Peter Bogdanovich interviewed Jimmy Stewart, Stewart told a story about a random guy who once told him, "You did this thing in a movie where you read a poem once … That was good." Stewart realized that the guy was talking about a movie that came out in 19...
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Spice World: David Lynch’s “Dune” at 30
Last summer, a major studio allowed James Gunn, an untested indie darling, to helm a big-budget adaptation of an obscure science-fiction property. That the result, Guardians of the Galaxy, was a global hit, struck many as a surprisingly lucrative gamble. In hi...
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Come Fail with Us: “The Life Aquatic” at 10
I first saw The Life Aquatic in late 2004, when it premiered at the Winifred Moore Auditorium as part of the Webster University Film series. The exhibitors had supplied the university with boxes of souvenir caps baring the film’s title and a distinctive traffi...
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Bye Bye Life: “All That Jazz” as Film Criticism
“Sometimes I don’t know where the bullshit ends and the truth begins.” Neither do any of us, really, but so few eviscerate our own lives with the kind of crackling critical energy that Bob Fosse did. As Angelique (Jessica Lange), his own personal angel of deat...
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Losing My Religion: “The Decalogue”
Twenty-five years ago, before the “golden age of television” was ever christened, Krzysztof Kieslowski blessed Polish TV sets with his majestic work The Decalogue, a series of 10 short films loosely based on the Ten Commandments. It was a distinctive cinematic...
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