Perils of Pauline Kael

 literature, movies  No Responses »
Nov 092011
 

From a NYRB piece about Pauline Kael:

Crowds rearranged themselves when Kael entered the room, literally and figuratively. She had an almost talismanic belief in the validity of her first response to a movie (she never saw it twice)

Which I suppose is fair enough, since very few of her audience would see it twice, either. Still, it’s a little different from what used to be the basis for critical judgement worth contention. I was schooled to think that to know a text practically by heart was the basis for any serious conversation about it. This implies, in its turn, that some texts are much more valuable than others . . . A lost world? Not quite: the people who keep it up are the devotees.

 Posted by bruce at 2:09 pm

Easy Virtue

 movies, writers  No Responses »
Mar 252009
 

There’s a review of this movie at the Noel Coward Society Website which does the basics nicely.

Amongst the felicities, the casting of Jessica Biel as the Woman with a Past. It’s difficult to adapt a ‘stagy’ stage play, one that exploits the big entrance, the expressive group, the d?nouement with the hero centre stage. Keep too much of that stuff, and the film goes dead; do too much, in an effort to avoid stasis, and you’re out on your own with an unrelated mise-en-sc?ne. (Opera films offer hideous examples of both kinds of failure.)

Coward’s play is full of big scenes and strong confrontations, often with Biel’s character front and centre. Biel holds it together with the complete self-possession of a former model and the presence of a first-rate romantic actress. Continue reading »

 Posted by bruce at 11:44 pm  Tagged with: ,

Art films in Oz

 movies  No Responses »
Mar 242009
 

Turns out Dr Garry Gillard, friend to this blog, has a chapter about art film in his Ten Types of Australian Film, available online.

Virtually every Australian film-maker chases a government subsidy, and to that end they write elaborate submissions. It would be interesting to compare how they describe their projects with the genres into which Garry places them. I have a hunch that many of the submissions would get the word ‘art’ in there somewhere, trading on the received view that art is good for you, like milk, and should be subsidised, like dairy farms. Then there’d be the ones that claim to be forging Australian Identity, which is something you get from watching movies.

 Posted by bruce at 12:22 pm  Tagged with:

How’s that again Oscar?

 movies  No Responses »
Mar 052008
 

Well I tried and tried to get all the way through No Country for Old Men but about 20 minutes from the end a routine inner state check reported:

  • faint aversion to pending violent action
  • faint desire for pending violent action
  • resultant scrunched up, induced anxiety
  • foreknowledge that psychotic killer will kill woman -
  • slightly stronger aversion to seeing that
  • no other interest whatsoever in who kills who or how or who gets the money.

So I went forth into the daylight and bought a book for my son.

I browsed some reviews that night: Good and evil are tackled with a rigorous fix on the complexity involved. This is P. Travers in Rolling Stone who thinks that we would all have taken the money (and left the wounded man to die of thirst). I conclude that his fix on the people who share the planet with him is something less than rigorous.

There’s plenty more profundity-mongering around, but luckily you don’t have to go past Google’s first ten hits to find a drily unimpressed Stephanie Zacharek in Salon

Against this backdrop of ruthless killings and overall creepiness, Sheriff Bell ponders the meaning of existence and other stuff, which would be pretty boring if not for the occasional distraction of human life being snuffed out by cattle-slaughter devices.

For those who like camera angles, there are lots of camera angles.

 Posted by bruce at 11:18 pm  Tagged with:
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