Donen and Kelly, Frankenheimer, Salina, Skolimowski, Téchiné

Flow: For Love of Water (Irena Salina, 2008). Because there are few things we enjoy in our house than watching documentaries that offer an assessment, in painful detail, of how humanity is engaged in self-inflicted extinction through carelessly destructive exploitation of one of the most necessary substances for human existence. It make for a fun night of movie-watching. Real popcorn fare. Irene Salina’s film is compelling and suitably frightening, although it occasionally tangles itself up because there’s simply so much ground to cover. As admirably as it presents the scope of the problem, there are definitely times when it seems … Continue reading Donen and Kelly, Frankenheimer, Salina, Skolimowski, Téchiné

Spectrum Check

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