Film After Film: (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?)
J. Hoberman
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 1844677516
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
One of the world’s most erudite and entertaining film critics on the state of cinema in the post-digital—and post-9/11—age. This witty and allusive book, in the style of classic film theorists/critics like André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, includes considerations of global cinema’s most important figures and films, from Lars von Trier and Zia Jiangke to WALL-E, Avatar and Inception.
Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War
Washington and Schreiber give more emotionally nuanced and richly neurotic performances than Sinatra or Harvey (although Schreiber is unable to top the latter’s sheer unpleasantness). And Kimberly Elise actually makes sense of Janet Leigh’s surreally inconsequential part. Indeed, following a dozen years of docs, light comedy, and p.c. weepies, Candidate represents Demme’s best dramatic filmmaking since The Silence of the Lambs. Perhaps coincidentally, Silence of the Lambs was itself part of an
in so-called real life, the Neanderthal homilies and bully-boy will-to-power that the Arnold’s movies have always concealed behind the fig leaf of self-reflexive irony. CHAPTER ELEVEN 2005: LOOKING FOR THE MUSLIM WORLD As Bush began his second term, a first draft of US history—at least in Iraq—continued to be written by a series of independent documentaries and embodied by a new cycle of Hollywood political thrillers. NEW YORK, MARCH 2, 2005 Documentaries, like spinach, are supposed to
demonstrate the fascist thrill of dominating a helpless fellow human—although Sabrina says that hers were an intended exposé of prison conditions. (As evidence, however, they only served to send the bad apples to jail, while their superiors and the system that created Abu Ghraib went largely unscathed.) But whether one interprets these images as proof of torture or sadism or artistic expression, they attest to the gross objectification of the prisoners (who are scarcely less objectified in this
subjected North Korean installations to the heaviest air attacks since World War II. Congress voted $52 billion toward a worldwide network of military bases. In late June, air-conditioned theaters in ten large American cities hooked into a closed-circuit telecast of the latest civil-defense procedures; three days later, the CBS news show See It Now televised a simulated nuclear attack on New York City. And on the last two Saturday nights in July, routine air traffic was directed away from the
cases over the course of an hour and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, well …1 Among other things, the movie’s staged hyper-reality offers a stunning dialectic between drama and artifice—where did Puiu find these actors? Ion Fiscuteanu in particular demonstrates an astonishing absence of vanity in the title role. Puiu’s movie also oscillates between naturalism and allegory. The endlessly patient paramedic (Luminita Gheorghiu) who initially fetched Lazarescu from his flat is obliged to wait with him in
