eXistenZ (David Cronenberg, 1999) A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. While the author certainly won’t win over any Luddites…his intriguing, if stiflingly dense, analysis offers much for the adventurous reader to chew on.” It’s tempting to think of a film as an external, discrete object – one passively observed and, […]
Honor Long Overdue: Da Five Bloods
By Johnnie Hobbs III. While Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee’s first war drama, suffers from its myriad of storylines, it seems that Da 5 Bloods is the beneficiary of a lesson learned.” Recently, I asked my father about his time in the army and how it’s affected his life. […]
Not Like You Remember: On Darius Marder’s The Sound of Metal
By Zoe Kurland. We too feel the disastrous consequences: one dramatic pop and the sound is yanked from our clutches, leaving both the audience and Ruben underwater.” In a 1998 interview for Guitar World, The Smashing Pumpkins’ front man Billy Corgan described Heavy Metal as “a universal energy.” “It’s the sound […]
Boundless Attraction: Ana’s Desire
By Gary M. Kramer. “Remains intriguing….uncomfortable, but never exploitative.” The feature directorial debut by Emilio Santoyo, Ana’s Desire, opens with static shots and silence. Ana (Laura Agorreca) lives with her cute young son Mateo (Ian Garcia Monterrubio, charming, never cloying). She cares for him, and tends to her plants, until […]
Visceral Complicity: Teruo Ishii’s Inferno of Torture
By Jeremy Carr. The emphasis on carnage hardly indicates what is truly the film’s more disturbing content, namely its brutal treatment of the women.” Teruo Ishii’s Inferno of Torture is a difficult film to assess. On one hand, it fails to live up to the bold assertions made by Arrow […]
An Uneasy Homecoming: on Alan Ball’s Uncle Frank
By Zoe Kurland. Uncle Frank takes many leaps of faith to peddle a strong message of self-love, yet leaves us with a forced reconciliation, tying a sloppy bow around a very unwieldy, amber-tinged package.” Alan Ball’s latest film, Uncle Frank, opens in the midst of a South Carolina summer. A […]
Nostalgia Falls Flat: Sylas Dall’s They Reach
By Elias Savada. They Reach offers slow build up and small jump scares. Too much music, not enough imagination, although the direction is adequate.” They Reach starts like a low-budget road trip reboot of the sadly departed Supernatural tv series (well, two guys in a station wagon, with a gun […]
In Cinema’s Genes – Comics and Pop Culture: Adaptation from Panel to Frame
American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003) A Book Review by Thomas Puhr. The collection’s 19 contributors deftly sidestep the ‘Are superhero movies cinema?’ debate – which usually leads to pointless semantic hair-splitting – and instead focus on diverse examples (from American Splendor, to Modesty Blaise and Scott Pilgrim) to illustrate the […]
Embracing the Imbecility of Life: Stuart Ashen Returns with Ashens and the Polybius Heist
By Elias Savada. All hail the group’s second silly caper that will undoubtedly engross some of you. It does have a certain intoxicating charm to it.” Recently I’ve been listening to a lot of Jerry Jeff Walker, the American country music troubadour who died last month. His rendition of Gary […]
Let’s Go to the Videotape: Foulness Afoot in Alexander Nanau’s Collective
By Elias Savada. Horrific footage of the inferno casts an eerie light as Nanau’s film begins, and, with a surgeon’s precision, he peels away the scab hiding an immoral national health-care system at home, one that had been secretly festering for a decade.” It took a Romanian sports journalist to […]