Thursday, November 17th, 2011
Melancholia
One of the hallmarks of a depressed mind is what Travis Bickle called “morbid self-attention.” Perhaps that explains why the depressed mind behind Melancholia—the film that Lars von Trier was supposedly trying to promote during his foot-in-mouth outbreak at Cannes this year—is so acute at describing the condition, as well as the delusions that always [...]
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Sunday, October 9th, 2011
My Joy
They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. But Sergei Loznitsa’s joy is, well, My Joy—even if its own jollity is purely titular. A swinish-looking man, sweat draining down the flaps of his ushanka, smiles nervously as he expounds his philosophy of life—mind-your-own-business non-interference—to a captive audience comprising a solitary, steely-eyed hitcher. Amidst this [...]
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Sunday, October 2nd, 2011
Drive
Eu•ro•trash (yoo r-oh-ˈtrash) n. Drive : The American.
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Thursday, September 29th, 2011
The Future
“The fault,” Cassius tells Brutus in Julius Caesar, “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Just as the fault is not in the moon, but in himself, when Jason (Hamish Linklater) freezes time in Miranda July’s film The Future, and supplicates the nearest celestial object to let him off the hook. His wife, Sophie [...]
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Thursday, July 14th, 2011
The Tree of Life
Terrence Malick’s movies are often called “magical,” and that’s typically not applied in the pejorative; but his sway has elements that Lord Voldemort, his unlikely box-office competitor, might be jealous of. “He is trying to film God,” Mick LaSalle believes; he’s “attempting … to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of [...]