November 2011
14 posts
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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”
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“On August 2, at the very first meeting of what was to become Occupy Wall Street,...”
– David Graeber, “Enacting the Impossible: On Consensus Decision Making”
Also: “We may never be able to prove, through logic, that direct democracy, freedom and a society based on principles of human solidarity are possible. We can only demonstrate it through action.”
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My review of Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In →
I started writing for Spectrum Culture, and this is my first review for them, so I hope you’ll check it out. I think Almodóvar’s latest is really great, and it was a joy to think and write about this film. It’s a little disappointing that the film isn’t getting as much attention as it deserves, which is strange because this is one of his most “out-there” films...
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“Two related late-modern developments have eroded the viability of the...”
– Nicholas Rombes, from the roundtable discussion “The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2”
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“The conventional wisdom is backwards. The black patient isn’t resistant...”
– The Last Psychiatrist, “Recent Trends in Stimulant Medication Use Among U.S. Children”
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“In his book on Francis Bacon, Deleuze writes that art “is not a matter of...”
– Steven Shaviro, from the roundtable discussion “The Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2”
If art is about capturing forces, then the force cinema is most well-equipped to capture is time, which reminds me of Yausjiro Ozu’s There Was a Father, of which...
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September 2011
10 posts
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“Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our...”
– Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
More of this, please!
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“Since film permits of no psychological explanations, the possibility of a change...”
– Béla Balázs, Visible Man or the Culture of Film
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“The real interface in the auditorium, the material border between spectator and...”
– Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An introduction through the senses 