The Ascent (Larisa Shepitko, 1977). The fourth and final feature from Soviet director Larisa Shepitko is a powerhouse drama set during World War II. After Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) are dispatched from their unit to seek desperately … Continue reading Then Playing — The Ascent; Love Field; Dune
The major dust-up on Film Twitter this week centered on the question of whether or not Twin Peaks: The Return can reasonably be considered a film instead of a television series. (By the way, the correct answer is “No,” and … Continue reading From the Archive — Blue Velvet
I know I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me when it was released in the summer of 1992, but I don’t recall if I wrote a review of it. That task probably fell to my partner on the movie review radio show, leaving me to simply announce I hated it when it was my turn to pipe in. I was, however, charged with writing about Wild at Heart in the fall of 1990, early in our program’s run. It was a nerve-wracking assignment. I was still learning how to write reviews and here I had to grapple with one … Continue reading From the Archive: Wild at Heart
#38 — The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) Joseph Merrick was born in Leicester, England in the mid nineteenth century. Malformed from his youngest days by an uncertain ailment–thought for years to be Neurofibromatosis type I–Merrick entered his adulthood as an abused member of a traveling freak show, touted as “The Elephant Man” and paraded about for the horrified amusement of the crowd. Abandoned, Merrick found his way to the care of a surgeon named Frederick Treves, who saw past the swollen features to the man within and endeavored to provide him with a deserved social dignity. With the added … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Thirty-Eight
Flash of Genius (Marc Abraham, 2008). Based on a New Yorker article, Marc Abraham’s directorial debut relates the story of Bob Kearns, a Detroit man whose invention of the intermittent windshield wiper was illegally appropriated by the big automakers. Dutifully tracing events from the early nineteen-sixties when Kearns drew his sizable family into the process of creating the device through the nineties when the court cases he pursued to get due credit finally reached their culmination, the film is serious, somber and sorely lacking in verve or any other enlivening spirit. It’s thankfully not overly pompous about its subject, but … Continue reading Abraham, Hiller, Lau and Mak, Lynch, Swanberg
Coffee for Two 