I’ve been trading emails with Doug, Trond, and Nick for years now, so I couldn’t be happier to see them entering the DVD production business, even if only tangentially. The Masters of Cinema Series will, no doubt, be a gift to all of us cinephiles. Cheers, guys.
We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American. We Americans represent less than 5% of the world’s population. For every 21 citizens of the world, only one is an American.
I genuinely admire Jeffrey Overstreet for his willingness to write this stuff. I’m glad that someone is doing it. I’m even more glad that that someone ain’t me.
Joanna was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition
A much longer response is in the works.
“Linklater has kept the story dark, and haunted by rumors of God.” — Erik Davis at Boing Boing
How strange. I just discovered that Sam Beam, of Iron and Wine, graduated from Florida State’s film school. As an alumnus of that program, my wife receives a monthly email notice, The Warren Report, that offers brief updates on the lives and careers of FSU filmmakers.
I’ve participated in the DVDBeaver listserv since its inception. Gary Tooze created the list when several of us who posted frequently in the Movies section of the Home Heater Forum decided that we needed a place to talk privately about foreign and art films. Here is a compiled list of our favorite films.
Williams “without poetry.” That can’t be good.
Like, one of Rohmer’s late comedies, the charm of Late August is found almost entirely in its characters (all of whom are likeable enough and three-dimensional enough) and in the smart things they say to one another. They twist themselves in existential knots, struggling to balance their idealized visions of integrity with the muddy necessity: compromise.
I’m almost finished Dreamer, Charles Johnson’s novel about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s struggles in Chicago in 1966, and it’s amazing — the finest novel I’ve read in months. (Dreamer wants to become part of my stalled dissertation; I have, as yet, managed to fight that urge.)
There’s little sense in writing about Dogville without discussing its final sequence, and there’s little sense in watching Dogville if you know how it ends.
Yesterday, I found the “Peace on Earth, No War on Iraq” sign that I carried in a protest during the rush to war, and it occurred to me that I am genuinely proud of that act. It’s difficult to explain, but I know that it was absolutely the right thing to do. I guess that’s why I’m taking some comfort from quotes like these, all taken from traditionally conservative commentators
Several years ago, in a seminar on modern and postmodern lit, I wrote a fun paper on Ezra Pound’s music criticism. In particular, I was interested in Pound’s admiration for Bartok’s String Quartet #5.
Poet/scholar Helen Vendler, the 2004 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, last night gave her address, “The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar,” which is as inspiring a defense of the arts as you’re likely to read.
The movers loaded up a truck yesterday, and it should arrive in Knoxville on Monday. Our new home will soon be filled with familiar furniture, all of it bittersweet for now. We’re both exhausted.
What a pleasant surprise to stumble into some nice bits of writing in, of all places, Stereophile magazine.
So many of Perrotta’s observations of suburban life are so spot-on — I especially like the way that his lead characters absolutely adore their children while still resenting somewhat the life-changes they’ve caused — but the narrative voice never quite transcends the banality of the lives it is documenting. Maybe that’s the point. I doubt it.
Andrew Christie imagines what he would tell Dick Cheney if he were in Kerry’s shoes. I just wish that Kerry would say something. His “we need a broader international coalition and more troops” line is already wearing thin.
It’s a heckuva song from Greetings from Michigan. I’ve added it and Stevens’ latest, Seven Swans, to my Amazon Wish List. Can anyone make a strong case for one album being better than the other? Any other Sufjan fans?
When I asked my ESL students last night about the great literatures of their native language, one of the Iranians told me about the Arab conquest of Persia. In their effort to erase all evidence of Persian culture, the ancient Arabs outlawed the speaking of Farsi, which, of course, only served to inspire a new generation of writers.
Joan Chittister watched Condoleezza Rice’s testimony with great interest, hoping to learn more about our government’s pre-9/11 knowledge of al-Qaeda. Instead, she was stunned by “the amount of self-congratulation spent on the fact of the testimony itself.”
My brain is turning soft. It’s not that I’ve forgotten to update my 2004 film viewing and reading lists; it’s that I have, for all intents and purposes, abandoned my intellectual life. I don’t have the energy for it. Or the time. Or — and this is the big one — the attention span. And it’s starting to wear me down.
I’ve been meaning to post this one for some time now. I’m not sure how well “Cucurrucucu Paloma” will work for those of you who haven’t seen Almodovar’s Talk to Her, but I had to buy the soundtrack for this song alone. I just can’t imagine being able to sing like Caetano Veloso. I’d never talk again.
Last night I delivered the following talk at the 2004 NEXUS Interdisciplinary Symposium: Reconstructing Theory and Value.
With my last reworking of Long Pauses, I attempted to rebuild its architecture from the ground up using CSS. Cross-platform and cross-browser problems stopped me dead, though. Just when I thought I had it all figured out, I’d open a page in Netscape or Safari and watch it all blow up.
Yesterday I finally got my hands on the first issue of the new Beyond, and I can’t tell you how proud I am to be associated with it.
Jon Ronson has been given permission to dig through the boxes that fill Kubrick’s Hertfordshire home — the lucky bastard — and he’s written about some of his findings.
When I was 19 I played piano in a big band. One night, during a break, I started playing part of “South Side of the Sky” and within a minute the rest of the rhythm section joined in. It was really sloppy, but we made it from the end of the piano solo through most of the “la la la la la la la la” part.
Via GreenCine Daily comes this link to Biskind Blows. I haven’t read Down and Dirty Pictures, and have no real desire to, but, based on others’ reports, I feel safe in assuming that my main beef with Easy Riders, Raging Bulls applies to his newer work as well.