February 2012
12 posts
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“The three cinematic categories are… ranked by degree of sublimation. On the...”
– Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
Well, this is simply one of my favorite books, but this passage is one I keep returning to in my mind over and over again. It helps if you know the plot of Body Double, where an actor fails to get cast in a Shakespeare...
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“In Hour of the Wolf the artist Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) describes a childhood...”
– Robin Wood, Ingmar Bergman
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Five K-Pop Songs I Loved in January 2012
[Here are five K-pop songs from January 2012 that I loved. I might try to make this a monthly feature here on this blog, partly as a way to force myself to stay on top of the newest K-pop releases. Click on the song titles to download an mp3 of the song.]
Sunny Hill - “The Grasshopper Song”
When I first heard of mixed-gender K-pop group Sunny Hill, I thought that the name sounded...
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Carnage and A Separation: Two Contrasting Views of...
Carnage and A Separation: two films with so many similarities, yet at the same time so different. Both films pivot on disputes between two couples—both of which disputes have to do with harm done to one of the couple’s offspring (an actual child in Carnage and a fetus in A Separation)—and in both films, nearly every scene features people argumentatively butting heads with one...
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January 2012
18 posts
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The Drama of Middle-Aged Masculine Angst
Recently, I watched two films—Irvin Kershner’s Loving (1970) and Paul Mazursky’s Blume in Love (1973) (both starring George Segal!)—that feel linked in my mind due to their shared genre. Let’s call this (perhaps distinctly American) genre the “drama of middle-aged masculine angst.” This genre seems to have emerged within cinema by the 1960s, but it’s...
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“Critical wisdom has it that ABBA material darkened in the late 1970s because the...”
– Tom Ewing, “The History Book on the Shelf” Poptimist column (2007)
Spot-on ABBA observations, especially regarding “Dancing Queen.”
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“It’s a cliché but accurate to say that country & western is split...”
– Frank Kogan, “Frank Kogan’s Country Music Critics’ Ballot 2005 (excerpt),” in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006
I’ve been catching up on the music criticism of Frank Kogan after discovering his 2011 Pazz & Jop ballot, in which he lists a number of K-pop records...
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“One of the reasons Little Murders works, and is indeed a definitive reflection...”
– Roger Ebert, “Little Murders” (1971)
Maybe it’s because of the recent spate of Ebert reviews that have enraged me in some way or another—I don’t usually read him, but when I have lately, he’s always made me upset—but I guess I’d forgotten that his...
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“Linda Williams demonstrates how, in Muybridge’s contributions to the...”
– Mary Anne Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s
I’ve been turning this passage over in my head for over a week now. It seems to contain a whole universe of other questions (and maybe even some answers, which in turn will probably lead to more questions), but I...
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POP UTOPIANISM: a manifesto / WE NEED TO TALK...
(cover image credit: fuckyeahkpopmacros) What follows is an attempt to explain why I love pop music (particularly why I love it much more so than most other people who are in my general demographic or who share a similar taste in music, art, cinema, etc.). Following that is a mix I made of K-pop, with which I’ve recently become obsessed. As much as I love pop music in general, K-pop has...
“If one were to give an account of all the doors one has closed and opened, of...”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.
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“The only thing that remained the same, no matter the film or the benshi, were...”
– Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (1960)
I have just started reading Anderson and Richie’s book, and already, only a few pages in, it is awesome.
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“Much of the shattering impact of [the shower scene in Psycho] derives from...”
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William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze
Based on these assumptions, Hitchcock is still partially responsible for the music in Psycho: Herrmann may have had a great idea (not to mention the fact that he composed the music), but Hitchcock listened to him, despite his own initial instinct...
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“The emergence of kkonminam [literally, “flower handsome man”] is...”
– Roald Maliangkay, “The effeminacy of male beauty in Korea” International Institute for Asian Studies (Newsletter 55, Autumn/Winter 2010)
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“My emphasis is on cinema as shared fantasy and social myth. In that sense...”
– J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties
(Via Jessica Winter)
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“America is the always re-remembered satisfaction of the image, whose status as...”
– Thomas Elsaesser, “Spectators of Life: Time, Place, and Self in the Films of Wim Wenders,” in The Cinema of Wim Wenders: Image, Narrative, and the Postmodern Condition, edited by Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemünden (1997)
Two additional notes: First, the usherette mentioned in The...
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“According to [Alexander Mitscherlich], National Socialism is, among other...”
– Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (2009)
Not only is this a brilliant, and in my opinion absolutely spot-on, insight about the impact of modernity on narcissism, but one could easily extrapolate this idea beyond Nazi Germany: if modernity...
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“Much of the shattering impact of [the shower scene in Psycho] derives from...”
– William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze
Is this evidence for or against auteurism? I think many people would say “against,” given that this idea to use music in the scene, a now-iconic feature so widely imitated and praised, did not originate with Hitchcock but with Herrmann....
December 2011
5 posts
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Just North of Something Important: The extra... →
barthel:
When someone used to make a joke that referred to some pop-cultural ephemera - Joe Isuzu, or “Where’s the Beef?” or Zsa Zsa Gabor hitting a cop or whatever - we laughed because it acknowledged something we all knew about. When someone now makes a joke that references all but the most widely-known…
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An Interpretation of the First Two Chapters of... →
These are great, and above all, they illustrate (figuratively and literally) that Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas are most comprehensible when visualized. Who could read the phrase “body without organs” and not attempt to picture that idea? It helps that the drawings retain some mystery, as part of the joy of reading D&G is the way you struggle with visualization in a way that...
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November 2011
14 posts
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“Here’s what PTSD is like, and why people kill themselves over it. Think of...”
– Jim Gourley, “Of lepers and caves”
Putting this quote up because I just saw Martha Marcy May Marlene, which depicts a woman suffering from PTSD. This condition is something I’m very interested in, so I approached the film from that perspective, and I was pleasantly surprised to...
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“I don’t like this expression “First World problems.” It is...”
– Teju Cole on the “#firstworldproblems” meme, in a series of tweets compiled by Alexis Madrigal
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A Twitter Conversation on Terence Davies' The Deep...
By request, here is a transcript from last Friday of a Twitter conversation between myself, Phil Coldiron, and later Dan Sallitt (with the scene-stealing insights) on Terence Davies’ newest film The Deep Blue Sea.
@loosejoints: The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies): did anyone else find this critique of convention a little too compact and coy?
@loosejoints: Some moments of...
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Depression, Melancholia, and Me: Lars von Trier's...
I don’t expect every critic to tell his life story (as I am selectively doing here), but I think it is only honest to make clear to readers: “Here I am. I am writing this. I am not infallible. I am just a human being like yourself. What I have to say and the way in which I say it was determined by my own background, my own experience, my own understanding (or lack thereof). I...
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“The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment...”
– Tim Dickinson, “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich” Rolling Stone (November 9, 2011)
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“Cukor used his actors, quite blatantly, as his surrogates. “If I were very...”
– Dan Callahan, “Great Directors: George Cukor” Senses of Cinema (October 2004)
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“Slapstick is a mode of thought in Godard, another way of exploring possibility;...”
– Richard Combs, “François Truffaut: Day Into Night” Film Comment (2011)
Also: “The way James Monaco interprets Truffaut’s pairings (in his contribution to Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary) is in line with a view of Truffaut’s expansive humanism: ‘these...
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“Image also plays a critical role in separating the two countries’ pop...”
– Patrick St. Michel, “How Korean Pop Conquered Japan” The Atlantic (September 13, 2011)
Aside from that gratuitous, self-satisfied final sentence, this paragraph is quite interesting. I wish I knew more about both cultures to extrapolate anything from this with any certainty—and...
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October 2011
10 posts
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“I attended a panel on Kael at the New York Film Festival, where Kellow took...”
– Self-Styled Siren, “Lucking Out and Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark”