Wednesday, October 20, 2010
I don’t try to remember what happens in a book. All I ask of a book is to give me energy and courage to tell me there’s more to life than I can take, to remind me of the need to act. —Léolo
It’s not the first man. It’s the second and third and fourth and fifth; and they all become that first man. And by the fiftieth, and at close range, they all become the same face. When you kill, you kill the same guy over and over and over again. —Samuel Fuller, quoted in The Typewriter, […]
Both the book and the movie made me squee like a school girl. Which is to say: this is not my most dignified moment ever. Come to think of it, my other moments aren’t bursting at the seams with dignity either. But there’s certainly a graduated scale. For instance, it’s rare for librarians to guffaw […]
Thursday, January 15, 2009
I recently watched The Apartment, with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, directed by Billy Wilder. It’s a comedy of sorts, but Wilder addresses some heavy themes—suicide, contentment, and materialism, to name a few—that make this film more than forgettable slapstick. I read the script years ago. That was a sort of hobby of mine for […]
I first saw Don Hertzfeldt’s work in high school, when a friend passed me a laptop playing Ah, L’Amour. “This is hilarious,” he said, and the four of us clustered around the tiny screen. He was right. Ah, L’Amour is bitter and surreal and appeals to everything a middle class American boy loves—violence and bombastic […]
I don’t remember how the subject of Sisyphus came up, but my dad remembered he watched this animated short 30 years ago, found it and showed it to me, because he knows how much I enjoy such things. Marcell Jankovics directed Sisyphus in 1974, and it earned him a well-deserved Oscar nomination. The short is […]
I’m pretty late on noticing this, but Joss Whedon (and Company) have made something delightful and fresh. Again. A supervillian musical, made especially for the internet and eventually DVD, with extras. Some people (not me) think one needs a reason to do something like that besides the self-evident ones. As in: supervillains, a freeze-ray, self-important […]
I just watched Der Golem: wie er in die Welt kam, a silent horror film made in 1920, directed by Henrik Galeen and Paul Wegener, and written by Henrik Galeen and Gustav Meyrink. It’s part of a trilogy, though most of the footage from the first film is lost. I confess: none of those names […]