By Elias Savada. Unfolding with military precision, enhanced by a steady, determined pacing…. We can be an ingenious species. When bad things happen, there are any number of special people who come up with solutions to seemingly unsolvable, life-threatening problems. The crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft is often called mankind’s greatest feat of improvised […]
The Face of the Female Guestworker Experience: Pınar Öğrenci on Gurbet is a Home Now
By N. Buket Cengiz. I began to explore how the guestworker phenomenon was represented in literature, cinema, and music…. As one of the latest representatives of the new generation migrant artists, I wanted to follow the footsteps of the artists before me and join them by including this kind of […]
Waiting for da Vinci, or Someone Like Him: The Lost Leonardo
By Elias Savada. Danish director Koefoed has created an absorbing gathering of principal players in the scams and schemes at play in the art world, gathering opinions, comments, and stories that could make your toes curl, and rob you blind.” When I say Leonardo, most of you will think either […]
Justice for Alternative Identities: Queer Japan
By Matthew Fullerton. A welcomed addition to a wonderful run, in recent years, of international documentaries highlighting the experiences, struggles, and successes of LGBTQ people in countries not normally associated with sensitivity toward LGBTQ activism.” Queer Japan, from Canadian filmmaker Graham Kolbeins and Altered Innocence, an American distributor of artistic […]
Cherishing the Legendary Haruomi Hosono: No Smoking
By Matthew Fullerton. Charming in that it strikes a fine balance of chronology and intimate, and often amusing, interludes of today’s seventy-something Hosono.” Japan’s Brian Eno, Neil Young, and Mark Mothersbaugh are just a few of the allusions bandied about by diehard fans of musician, singer-songwriter, composer, producer, and all-round […]
American Decay, Viewed Through A Hometown – Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
By Michael Sandlin. ‘The election of President Reagan in 1980 initiated a mass transfer of wealth and power away from ordinary Americans’ intones Kristof in his voiceover; of course, what Kristof doesn’t tell you is that many of these ‘ordinary’ Americans voted for Reagan, thus essentially voting away their own […]
Frustration in Falfurrias: Lisa Molomot and Jeffrey Bemiss’s Missing in Brooks County
By Elias Savada. The film examines, sometimes in gruesome detail, the unfortunate migrant disappearances and deaths that have occurred in this eponymous region of Texas, about an hour’s drive from the Mexican border….” I’ve watched a lot of documentaries through the years. Among those that make me mad: Blackfish (2013), […]
Spectacle and the Deranged Landscape – Werner Herzog by Joshua Lund, and Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
John Duncan Talibird
September 9, 2020
Stroszek (1977): “Americans…believe that they are normal, that they make sense, and that the rest of the world is exotic. They do not seem to understand that they are the most exotic people in the world right now” –Werner Herzog By John Duncan Talibird. How do you write about Werner […]
What We Already Know, Too Well – Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump
By Michael Sandlin. Dan Partland’s well-intended but flawed documentary has at least done its democratic duty and created a forum for these previously silenced psychiatrists to outline just how much of a deranged wingnut Donald Trump really is.” In some ways, it seems almost unfair to single out Donald Trump […]
Saving Man’s (and Woman’s) Best Friends: Jesse Alk’s Pariah Dog
By Elias Savada. Pariah Dog highlights Alk’s ability as an extremely gifted, poetic, and even counter-culture filmmaker who has fashioned a labor of love for his debut feature.” A hazy dusk is arriving in Kolkata in West Bengal, India (the most far eastern part of the country, on the border […]