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“Living, breathing, seething, talking, wailing, murmuring walls,” says Agnès Varda in voiceover. Such are the sprawling Los Angeles murals of Mur Murs (1981), which Varda carefully cataloged upon her return to the city in 1979. Ten years prior, Varda had shot Lions Love (… and lies) (1969) in LA, which features a spacey trio (James Rado and Gerome Ragni of Hair, 1967 and Viva of Warhol Factory fame) musing on sex, stardom, and politics. The film was Varda’s plunge into…
“Living, breathing, seething, talking, wailing, murmuring walls,” says Agnès Varda in voiceover. Such are the sprawling Los Angeles murals of Mur Murs (1981), which Varda carefully cataloged upon her return to the city in 1979. Ten years prior, Varda had shot Lions Love (… and lies) (1969) in LA, which features a spacey trio (James Rado and Gerome Ragni of Hair, 1967 and Viva of Warhol Factory fame) musing on sex, stardom, and politics. The film was Varda’s plunge into…
Johan Grimonprez’s new documentary, Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024), is an educational film. I do not mean this in a pejorative sense, but only to remind the film’s viewers that most of the great historians actually committed to elucidating the Western world’s crimes over the course of the last century have been independent artists. This is the case with novelists like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon whose satirical bite holds more truth than any mid-century reportage. But this is…
Of the many meta-horror films that situate terror within the filmgoing experience, none are so fixated on the experience of viewership as the Spanish director Bigas Luna’s early English-language feature Anguish (1987). Its Russian-doll narrative structure spirals around a serial-killing ophthalmologist, John (Michael Lerner), who collects eyeballs under the hypnotic influence of his overbearing mother (Zelda Rubenstein of Poltergeist, 1982). Yet when the fourth wall suddenly ruptures, the setting shifts to a theatrical screening of The Mommy, the apparent film-within-a-film,…
The sophisticated, the vulgar; the sweet, the sour: always they wrestle within Blake Edwards. Contaminations abound in his work: mostly comedies, with select lapses into the musical (the glorious Darling Lili, 1970) or outright melancholy (Days of Wine and Roses, 1962; Wild Rovers, 1971). But we should not measure his mixed-mode visions to those of, say, Chaplin, who goes down smoother. (This does not make Edwards inferior to Chaplin.) Let’s never play the tiresome Harold Bloomian game of Who’s Best…
Close to the ground, beneath the noise of tech industry hype cycles, San Francisco operates in the usual patterns of labor, attention, and change. It is a relief to see this subtle reality depicted in art when so often the city is represented via its most contrived and rapacious aspects.
There is a moment in Ben Grossman’s film In the Clear Stream of All of It that at first struck me as so relatably self-conscious I felt uncomfortable. Caitlyn Galloway,…
“Merry fuckin’ Christmas” is the third or fourth line in Dark Angel (1990), exclaimed moments after a distracted driver careens into a lot of spruce trees. Though rarely, if ever, mentioned in the same breath as seasonal genre classics like Die Hard (1988) or Lethal Weapon (1987), Dark Angel (also released as I Come In Peace), deserves a place alongside the holiday crime mainstays as a novel skewering of yuletide cheer.
Directed by long time stunt coordinator Craig R. Baxley,…
Paradoxically, in order for a screen character to seem psychologically credible, they must be pruned of the inconvenient complexities that constantly test the boundaries of lived identity. Consequently they become less authentic, but more instructive. Dramatic legibility demands that doubt, confusion, mimicry, and flights of cruelty, to name a few stress-tests for the self, are both limited in number and properly digestible by the story. Behavior and dialogue mutually reassure the coherence of a given character. A two-hour film necessarily…