March 2012
0 posts
February 2012
6 posts
January 2012
5 posts
Black Lodge/White Lodge
I Am Ready For My Close-Up Today
(This was originally part of an essay on Kill List that’s going to be in The Brooklyn Rail next month, but it didn’t really work with the rest of the piece, so now it’s here in slightly expanded form.)
Consider: In John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), our heroic maniac, Michael Myers, knifed teens under the auspices of a clear, if indefensible, moral code, a conservative...
October 2011
1 post
September 2011
2 posts
Real Courage
Sleepwalk (Sara Driver, 1986)
The mood from Duelle. A story from a napkin that Pynchon threw out when he was making notes for Lot 49. A lead actress with the most expressive nose this side of Laura Dern. Sara Driver gets at an image in the most complicated manner she can, usually finding about 18 different shadows and then circling them with a few more distractions – even when things seem like...
August 2011
9 posts
Ghost Stories
Numéro zéro (Jean Eustache, 1971)
First things first: dialectical film: two cameras – one moves, the other doesn’t. The movement of the one is purely optical, which is both psychological and historical; the stasis of the other is purely scientific. A film about history: of the 20th century; of a woman; of a family; of a future; of Jean Eustache’s beautiful life. A film about science: an...
July 2011
14 posts
June 2011
5 posts
April 2011
4 posts
2 tags
It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.
‘And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what—a hundred years? two hundred?—and they’ll crumble, and the grass...
2 tags
