So, Spectrum Culture this week…

I truly believe in reviewing films almost entirely on their own merits. It’s hard to confront a film by a major director without putting it into a career-long context (and there’s obviously some merit to that approach), but a significant number of viewers won’t be doing that. They meet a film for what it is and any comparisons to other creative efforts will be superficial at best. Still, it was so very tempting for me to expend a whole lot of words in my review of Nikolaus Geyhalter’s documentary Abendland to the three-hour, staidly observational non-fictional depiction of a Portuguese island that I covered a couple weeks ago. Abendland, using the impetus of examining Europe–largely the hidden Europe–at night, is the significantly better film and helps me crystallize some of the reservations I had about the earlier It’s the Earth Not the Moon which caused my to give a fairly tepid recommendation. They would actually be great films to review together, in a single piece.

Other than that, my only other writing for the site was a brief bit for our latest Monthly Mixtape. I wrote about the new Wye Oak single, because I am evidently not currently going to pass up any opportunity offer laudatory gushing about that band.