A talk with director Sam Cullman on "Art and Craft".

Star Wars - The Force Awakens / Long and slow, in a multiplex led far, far astray.

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...

Locke

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...

Alejandro Jodorowsky

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...

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