#24 — Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972) I will readily concede that it didn’t necessarily take a brilliant director to capture the crazy glint in Klaus Kinski’s eye–a nearsighted drunkard wielding a Polaroid with a scratched up … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Four
By the evidence of the reviews I wrote, I had a pretty grumpy week at Spectrum Culture. Through the normal cycle, I wound up with a lot of middling material to write about. First of all, I had the new album from Sonny and the Sunsets. I like their previous outing quite a bit, but this new release is drab and uninteresting. And I’m usually a sucker for breakup albums. On the movie side, I reviewed the directorial debut of Martin Donovan, still probably best known for the movies he made with Hal Hartley a couple decades ago. As if … Continue reading Spectrum Check
#25 — Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978) Interiors was Woody Allen’s eighth film as a director. That’s both an impressive amount of features to have churned out in his first twelve years as a filmmaker (Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth in sixteen … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Five
I don’t have a signed document to this effect or anything, but I do believe I have previously pledged to follow director Steven Soderbergh anywhere. That has brought me some undue misery over the years, but I’ve largely stuck by … Continue reading I feel the magic like I never felt before, I imagine that it’s always been there
The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949). This was the last film made by the great German director Max Ophüls during a brief dalliance with Hollywood, and it exhibits both his mastery of the form and the knack for scratching away at tremulous morality that probably sealed the failure of Stateside tenure. Based on the Elisabeth Sanxay Holding novel The Blank Wall (which later became source material for the Tilda Swinton vehicle The Deep End), the film relates the story of an everyday woman who attempts to cover up a murder that she suspects was perpetrated by her daughter against a … Continue reading Maysles brothers, Melville, Ophüls, Scherfig, Scott
Longer ago than I care to admit (it can be measured in decades, sadly), I first started reviewing movies on a weekly radio program, originally adopting the strategy of treating each new film as strictly its own entity. Theoretically, a sizable percentage of our listening audience would be coming to these films fairly fresh, with no working knowledge of the director’s wider oeuvre, the history of the production or any of the other odd particulars that can fill the heads of seasoned moviegoers as the lights go dim in the theater. I figured I should do the best I could … Continue reading Now he’s up above my head, hanging by a little thread
The 4th of July holiday meant a little bit light week at Spectrum Culture, but I still had a few words go up. On the film side, I reviewed the new film from André Téchiné, the acclaimed French director of Wild Reeds and several others. It always feels a little uncomfortable to take shots at a director with a highly valued history, but the movie was plainly lacking. It was a labor to get through. I also wrote about Fiona Apple for the second straight week, offering up a brief assessment of her new outing in our survey of the … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Falling in love can be treacherous business. The flush of excitement when interest clicks over to happy infatuation is undeniably thrilling, but it also foretells all the moments in the future when it won’t quite live up to the earlier … Continue reading In the spiritual kingdom of love, you’re the one that I’m thinkin’ of
#26 — Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, 1977) In 1990, film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert took a break from flinging their thumbs around in judgment and created a television special called The Future of the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Six
#27 — Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975) What does it say about the difference between European cinema, I wonder, that there’s such a pronounced fundamental difference between the two directors, roughly contemporaries, from each respective region that are best suited to having … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Twenty-Seven
Coffee for Two 