Cinema, Literature, Theater, Music, Art.

In The Force Awakens a black man is tasered twice, drinks putrid water from a trough alongside an animal resembling a pig, and - in his own words - states that he used to work in sanitation. OK. Let's let those details slide. Call me politically correct. A Cambridge lefty. I can take it. By the way, that black man is the film's male lead. Does that make everything okay? By now everyone pretty much agrees that there are no major surprises, aesthetically or narratively, in The Force Awakens. OK, maybe the aerial dogfights have a few more twists and turns than last time, and what happens to Han Solo is, well, something of a surprise (though we all saw it coming). But everything from the film's color palette to its chase-scene structure (where's the map? C'mon people!) smacks of deja vu all over again. Of course, it's supposed to. You don't make a billion dollars on a $350 million investment (that's some cabbage right there, folks!) innovating . You ma...

From El Topo (1970). Alejandro Jodorowsky (right). The idea of a western as something more than a good guy (white hat) / bad guy (black hat) showdown had been pioneered by John Ford as far back as Stagecoach (1939), but few if any - filmmakers can turn a genre piece into a quest for spiritual enlightenment. Infused with iconic and surreal imagery, El Topo is considered the grandaddy of midnight cult movies, and deservedly so. Jodorowsky has said his goal with regard to cinema is to re-create the experience of taking LSD, without taking the hallucinogenic. He wants to re-write the book on how humans perceive life and themselves. Highly ambitious, his films shatter every preconceived notion we have about what cinema is supposed to be.  Imagine Luis Bunuel, Quentin Tarantino, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez rolled into one and you'd probably get Alejandro Jodorowsky. He has called himself the "father of the midnight movie" and he's probably right. Throughout his c...

Great poster! Beautiful concept. The image tells us everything we'd want to know about the film. Especially gutsy is the decision to exclude Jesse Eisenberg's and Jason Segel's faces.  It's called a  two-hander . In the theatre it connotes a play with only two actors. hink  Driving Miss Daisy  or most plays by Samuel Beckett. In  The End of the Tour , Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg and director James Ponsoldt take the two hander into movie land, albeit with a supporting cast (including a hilarious comedic acting turn courtesy of Joan Cusack) and make it into a genuine, moving, funny, and heart-wrenching bit of cinema.  The celebrity writer and his admirer. Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel.  We may never know who David Foster Wallace really was. Already his estate is disowning this film - but the truth about that is also  up for grabs. All we have is the film, exhibit A (if you will), and what we read about it, along with Mr. Wallace'...

It's a genre. The literary film. Note the title's font, a clear reference to Philip Roth. It's a genre. You've seen the type before. The literary film. Stories about writers, their books, their lives, loves, egos, successes, and failures. Put a young, ambitious, self-absorbed writer in New York City, make him Jewish, give him a mentor and a string of girlfriends past and present, and call him Philip. Now add a title font that strongly resembles the fonts used on the covers of Philip Roth's books and you've got Alex Ross Perry's  Listen Up Philip.  Using two key techniques - a narrator's voice over (performed by Eric Bogosian) and long, dialogue-driven scenes filmed hand held in close ups - Perry's film is, like Jason Shwartzman's character, Philip Lewis Friedman, both attractive and repelling.  Listen Up Philip  attempts - and to some degree - succeeds in keeping us interested in the life of a lousy, heartless, but talented egoist.  Phil...

Locke's poster suggests speed. In fact, the BMW Locke drives down Britain's M6 motorway never goes above 60 mph. The movements here are all inside Locke's mind. Wonderful. Watching Locke you get the feeling the film was written and directed by a twenty five year old upstart. A kid , really, more interested in innovation than emotion. I looked up the writer/director. He is 56 year old Steven Knight, a Brit, and with a string of screenwriting credits behind him. So...that was my first misconception. The second one actually took place before I saw the film. I had read that the entire film took place inside a moving car, the camera trained on Mr. Hardy, and that was pretty much it. How, I wondered, could this possibly be anything more than an interesting, meandering, but ultimately failed experiment? As I say, that was my second misconception. The landscape of Tom Hardy's face in Locke registers a gamut of feelings. It's as much of a canvas as the surrounding l...

Criterion's poster for the re-relase of Ray's Apu Trilogy. If you go, see them in the order they were made, preferably in one day. Sure, it's a marathon, but worth every minute. For Boston folks, the Kendall Square Cinema has scheduled them to play back to back, with a 45 minute break between parts 2 and 3, just enough time for a sandwich and a beer at The Friendly Toast! “Never having seen a Satyajit Ray film is like never having seen the sun or the moon.”  —AKIRA KUROSAWA Criterion's restored 4K theatrical re-release of Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy ranks among the top cinematic events of the year. The films are deeply human and tell a timeless, universal story in the simplest of ways. The degree of authenticity here might lead one to believe they're watching a type of ethnographic or anthropological documentary when, in fact, we are talking about a filmmaking style closer to the Italian neo-realists (I'm thinking specifically of DeSica's B...