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Webliography: Title/Subject/Author
NEW WRITINGS!.
619) Werckmeister Harmonies/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Oftentimes, when bad critics run out of clever things to say about a film or director that they like, but know few others will appreciate, they will trot out the old ‘he’s an acquired taste’ gambit. Well, this is not true of Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. One simply appreciates a master craftsman at the top of his game, or not. It is one of the rarest things in art, to be able to ‘turn on’ someone to appreciate greatness. In fact, putting art aside, greatness is one of the things most difficult to comprehend; and this is, ironically, the very thing that Tarr’s 2000 film, Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister Harmóniák), is about....
Great.
620) The Zookeeper's Wife/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I have to say that I was pleasantly pleased after having read Diane Ackerman's latest non-fiction book, The Zookeeper's Wife. This is my first time reading anything of hers, and I was also surprised to find that she has talent as a poet. I say 'surprised' because more often than not, those who claim to have written poetry really don't succeed at it very much at all, but Ackerman, who has a nature bent to her work, possesses both literary quality and a good sense of historical and scientific background, which makes this book work....
Solid.
621) The Mascot/Book Review/Jessica Schneider A Jewish Nazi? Just reading the title with those two incompatible words, and one can see why this book has been published and pushed. If you think you've heard all the stories involving World War II, well clearly you haven't. Of course we will never know all of them, but in this new memoir by Mark Kurzem, he describes his young father's life during the war and how a Jewish boy went from being, in a sense, target practice for the Nazis to becoming one of them....
Meager.
622) God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater/Book Review/Jessica Schneider It is hard not to enjoy Vonnegut. Although Slaughterhouse Five still remains my favorite book of his, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is a quick and entertaining read that cleverly pokes fun at capitalism and greed while being fun all the way through. Eliot Rosewater is a fat slob. His family has recently inherited a large sum of money ($87,472,033.61 to be exact)....
Good Vonnegut.
623) A Tragic Honesty/Book Review/Jessica Schneider To say that Richard Yates lived a troubled life would be an understatement. In fact, after learning of his life, it is easy to see just where he got all his material, and why he writes so well about alcoholics. In many ways his troubles were not only cliche (the tortured, depressed, lonely, mentally unstable, financially struggling artist that no one appreciates or understands) they were also self-induced....
Ok.
501) Campaign 2008/Obama/Dan Schneider I am a political Independent who has voted in the last three Presidential General Elections for Ralph Nader. I did so, despite my Democratic roots, because I am a pragmatist and the last three Republican candidates for President were unappealing- not a budding Abe Lincoln nor Teddy Roosevelt in the lot. In 1992 I voted for Bill Clinton because of the disastrous 12 years of Reagan-Bush policies that destroyed the middle class, decimated the poor, and threatened civil liberties with their radical agenda for the Supreme Court. The choice was clear. The only other choices were the elder George Bush, who reaped the evil Ronald Reagan sowed, or a psychotic billionaire dwarf named Ross Perot, whose only vindication, all these years later, is that he was correct about the large flushing sound created by NAFTA....
Da man.
502) Stardust Memories/DVD Review/Dan Schneider One of the interesting things about a great work of art is how, upon re-experience a) it holds up and/or b) deepens into something even better. From the first time I saw Woody Allen’s 88-minute black-and-white 1980 effort Stardust Memories (made early on in Woody’s Golden Era of 1977-1992) on a VHS tape, I knew I was watching one of the greatest films ever made....
A classic.
503) Never Let Me Go/Book Review/Jessica Schneider One of the bad things about being a great writer is that readers will come to expect that writer to reach greatness every time, and so if a work falls just short at very good or merely excellent, this can be a disappointment. This is just what Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Never Let Me Go does. Because I have read now all of the works of Ishiguro — who has written great books like The Remains of the Day and An Artist of the Floating World as well as near great books such as A Pale View of Hills and The Unconsoled -- I can say that Never Let Me Go let me down a bit but that is only because I expect more from him than I would other writers....
Pretty good.
504) Rescue Dawn/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It’s been quite a few years since Werner Herzog did a major fictive film. The last couple of decades has seen an increasing veer into documentaries and more experimental cinema. However, with the 2007 film, Rescue Dawn, Herzog shows that the years have not taken their all too inexorable toll on the visionary mind. While the film is not an inarguably great masterpiece along the lines of some of his classic fictive films from the 1970s, it is a terrific war film, but, more so, a terrific prison escape and action film, even as it wholly subverts many of those subgenre’s worst banalities....
Herzog in command.
505) Approaching 70/Poem/Dan Schneider
Aging's not so bad.
506) Ruthless/Book Review/Jessica Schneider If you are laughing upon sight of this review of Ruthless: A Tell-All Book, I can say that I join you in your laughing. I’m going to be upfront and say that I’m no fan of Oprah Winfrey for many reasons. Yet, one would think that I’d be giving this trashy anti-Oprah book positive reviews then, right? First, a bit of background....
Oprah sucks- old news.
507) All Aunt Hagar's Children/Book Review/Dan Schneider Reading the latest book of short stories put out by Pulitzer Prize winner Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, was a profound disappointment because, unlike bad writers like Dave Eggers, T.C. Boyle, David Foster Wallace, newcomers like Donald Ray Pollock, or literary leeches like Thomas Steinbeck, Jones actually has (or had) writing talent. His 1991 book of short stories, Lost In The City, actually was a great piece of literature, with an astounding nine of its fourteen stories reaching greatness (utterly unheard of for published manuscripts). However, The Known World, his 2003 novel that actually won him the Pulitzer, was merely a mediocrity....
Bad from great.
508) Anne Of Green Gables/Book Review/Jessica Schneider I have been a longtime fan of the Anne of Green Gables made-for-TV movies, starring Megan Follows as Anne. Those films had done such a good job that I thought they’d be impossible to beat, and hence I only finally got around to reading the classic children’s tale, published back in 1908. The book is a very good one, and certainly a great children’s tale, yet it falls just short of the films....
Quality lit.
509) Last Year In Marienbad/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Forget all prior claims you’ve read about Alain Resnais‘ 90-minute, black-and-white L’Année dernière à Marienbad / Last Year in Marienbad (1961) from the bad to the good, from publicity nonsense which declaims the three main characters are named after letters (they are actually unnamed), and see it raw; for then you’ll see why greatness is its own company. That’s because the difference between this truly great film, a work of art considered a cinematic high point, and the 1962 Carnival of Souls, considered a B-horror film, are minimal. Their similarities, however, are considerable, even though I doubt that the latter film’s director, Herk Harvey, had even seen Last Year in Marienbad while making his only feature. I say this because Last Year in Marienbad truly is one of those works of art that the moment it is experienced the viewer connects with it as something they feel has always been. It is like that tune you hear that becomes a Top 40 hit, and you swear you’ve known it for years....
Escherian bliss.
510) Vampyr/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Criterion Collection will shortly be releasing a two-disk version of the 1932 black and white classic horror film by Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vampyr. I first watched this film about twenty years ago, on a VHS release, and, unlike many others, immediately recognized it as a supernal piece of cinema. Then, I did not have the critical knowledge to discern why, but I do now, and will explicate....
A classic.
512) High And Low/DVD Review/Dan Schneider While most well known for his classic Japanese period dramas, such as Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Throne Of Blood, the fact is that director Akira Kurosawa’s lasting legacy will be sustained by his towering achievements in then contemporary Japanese drama — films such as Ikiru, The Bad Sleep Well, and 1963’s black and white crime drama High And Low.....
Akira kicks ass.
511) Sonnet For My Pretty Skirt/Poem/Jessica Schneider
Good stuff.
513) The Rules Of The Game/DVD Review/Dan Schneider French filmmaker Jean Renoir’s 1939 black and white classic, The Rules Of The Game (La Règle Du Jeu), routinely shows up on Top Five lists for best films ever, along with classics like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story....
Overrated.
514) Vampyr/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Criterion Collection will shortly be releasing a two-disk version of the 1932 black and white classic horror film by Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vampyr. I first watched this film about twenty years ago, on a VHS release, and, unlike many others, immediately recognized it as a supernal piece of cinema. Then, I did not have the critical knowledge to discern why, but I do now, and will explicate....
A classic.
515) Shock Corridor/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Director Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor is one of those wildly aberrant works of art than can be called great, on some levels, and utter schlock, on other levels. And both are correct assessments of this film that can only be termed a didactic melodrama. What results, though, is that one is left with a so-so film- not the piece of pulp garbage that many reviewers first assailed the black and white film (with dream sequence snippets in color) as, upon its release in 1963, nor the masterpiece that revisionists have proffered in later auteur-based assessments. It had been almost a quarter century since I last watched the film, but recently popped in The Criterion Collection DVD of the film, and rediscovered its ‘charms.’....
Hit and miss.
516) The Wild Places/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Whenever I read a book that isn’t great but merely good, the writer will fall into two categories. The first is where the writer could be great, if only some trimming and tweaking were done. Frank McCourt falls into this category with his classic memoir Angela’s Ashes, for while the book is filled with terrific scenes and description, structurally the book is weak. The second involves a writer that, despite being good technically, lacks the “highs” of the first writer. Macfarlane falls into this second category, for while The Wild Places is technically a good, solid book, there is something missing from the writing that no amount of tweaking could ever make it a great work....
So-so.
517) Borat/DVD Review/Dan Schneider A couple of years ago, in 2006, the biggest comedy hit was a film called Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan. The film grew out of a recurring character on a British television show, Da Ali G. Show, created by Jewish comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. I mention the man’s religion because the film attacks anti-Semitism in a brutally funny way, even as many dull-witted critics accuse the film of that bias....
Hilarious.
518) Pather Panchali/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Somewhere between the Oriental placidity of a great Yasujiro Ozu film and the harsh reality of a great Vittorio De Sica drama lies the world of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, the first of his Apu Trilogy of films. And in case there was any doubt, that place is a very, very good one for any filmmaker to be, for the two aforementioned filmmakers were masters of their own sorts of films, and- if this one, and first, film of Ray’s is an indication, the same plaudits can be ascribed to Ray, a former advertising firm’s employee who struck out on his own to raise Indian cinema from the melodramatic doldrums it had been in since its creation....
Classic.
519) Au Hasard Balthazar/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The greatness of Robert Bresson’s 1966 black and white film, Au Hasard Balthazar (which, translated, means something like Randomly Balthazar or By Chance Balthazar), comes not from only one aspect of it, nor even just a few. Virtually every aspect of the film reeks and resonates greatness, although, despite this being the near full consensus opinion of film lovers and critics alike, a reading of the criticism suggests it is one of the most poorly understood films....
Nonpareil.
520) Red Clay, Blue Cadillac/Book Review/Dan Schneider Michael Malone is most well known for being the lead writer on the American soap opera One Life To Live. As someone who has watched soap operas and other serial fictions for years. I do not hold this against him. However, having read his collection of twelve stories centered on Southern belles, Red Clay, Blue Cadillac, I can say that he certainly doesn't hide the fact of his past employment....
Better than expected.
521) The Conscience Of A Liberal/Book Review/Dan Schneider In reading Paul Krugman’s 2007 book, The Conscience Of A Liberal, I wanted to be able to speak of his writing style, as much as of his opinions, politically and economically. This is because I simply get tired of books being criticized simply for their arguments and not how they are presented. In the last year or so, as example, I got two books that exemplified this approach....
Good stuff.
522) Fire/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I watched the 1996 Canadian film Fire by Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta after having long heard of its taboo nature based mainly on its depiction of lesbianism. And while not a silly film — such as the softcore When Night Is Falling or the horrid Hollywood ‘Hook’em’ Brokeback Mountain — Fire is nowhere near a great film, either. As for the lesbianism, there is very little skin and the ‘love story’ is rather demure. On the other hand, there is far too much radical Feminist (capital F) ideology that lowers the intellectual argument of Mehta’s film — the most obvious being that the film follows the line that all men are scum who use, abuse, neglect, and/or degrade women. Compounding matters, the two wannabe lesbians, Radha (Bollywood star Shabana Azmi) and Sita (Nandita Das), are drop dead gorgeous; they’re hardly ‘real-world’ lesbians along the lines of an Indian Andrea Dworkin, Rosie O’Donnell, or Ellen DeGeneres....
Ok.
523) An Autumn Afternoon/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Goddamn, Yasujiro Ozu’s great. Thus my first thought whilst taking in the last few moments of the Japanese film master’s last completed film, 1962’s An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma No Aj -- which, according to online sources, translates as The Taste Of Mackerel — a feeling Ozu reputedly wanted to evoke with this film). Yes, many critics have pointed out that it shares many concerns with earlier Ozu fims, and films that are considered greater films, but there is no doubt that this film is a great film, and arguably one of Ozu’s finest. It is in color, and clocks in at 112 minutes in length....
Great.
524) Say It Like Obama/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider Even the deepest McCain supporters cannot deny the talent that Barack Obama has for oration. His articulation, mannerisms, and wording all play a role in a delivery that has placed him beside the likes of Martin Luther King Jr. and JFK. His speeches have been quoted all around the globe, even published in their very own book. He is so good, in fact, that his opposition has seized on this and tried to turn his skill into a negative. “They’re just words,” some have said. “He’s only a celebrity,” others have claimed. But there is no denying Barack Obama’s ability to captivate an audience, and in Shel Leanne’s book, titled Say It Like Obama: The Power of Speaking With Purpose and Vision, readers are given insights into just how to use these techniques for themselves....
Say it!
525) Aparajito/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The first film of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, Pather Panchali, was such a great film that, naturally, the second film in the series was bound to suffer a bit of a letdown. Thus, Aparajito (The Unvanquished), based on the novel Aparajita, by Bibhutibhushan Banerjee, is not the unadulterated great piece of art that Pather Panchali is. Like many middle films of a series, it suffers from the infamous middle filmitis — when films that are not first in a series rely too heavily upon an audience’s memories of earlier films to inform them of the traits of characters, the chronology of prior events, and a general knowledge of the world the film series is set in....
Classic.
526) La Jetee/Sans Soleil/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Over the years, I had heard of the name Chris Marker, as an avante-garde filmmaker, but having sat through many lost hours, in my early twenties, watching Warhol Factory films and their dread knockoffs, one can understand why I was never particularly moved to engage the films of this man; especially considering that he was French, from that nation that launched the careers of such notable filmic failures as Jean Cocteau and Jean-Luc Godard. But, then I did something amazing. I actually dropped my biases, and watched and engaged the work of art before me (or, technically, the two works of art), and let it, not the opinions of others, dictate my reaction....
Great.
527) Flash Of Genius/Film Review/Dan Schneider The new film, Flash Of Genius, by first time director Marc Abraham, is one of those films that is well made, well acted, and well shot; technically, there is little to argue with. But, it’s still utterly predictable; as predictable as the sports film that features an underdog you just know will win in the end. As with most films that ultimately fail, this film fails for its screenplay. No film can succeed without a good screenplay — one with good dialogue, good characterization, and a good tale. The plot, also, has to come alive, and distinguish itself....
Eh.
528) Missing/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The 1982 political film, Missing, by Costa-Gavras (his first American production), is soon to be released on DVD by The Criterion Collection. It’s a good film, but not a great one. This is mostly because it lacks any real poetry, the way Ingmar Bergman’s anti-war film, Shame, has. Yes, it’s well plotted, well acted, well directed, and scrupulously avoids sentimentality. But it also avoids any real higher purpose. Yes, Costa-Gavras is perhaps the foremost political filmmaker of our time, but that does not absolve an artist for failing to strive to dig deeper, core into something more essential, or give a perspective on a known event in a different way that allows for a newer understanding. Of course, these things are not requirements, but they are the hallmarks of greatness....
Missed potential.
529) The Gulag Archipelago/Book Review/Jessica Schneider The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 is a great firsthand account of the Russian prison camps, written by someone who not only lived in them but can also write well. Never turgid, the narrative does not suffer the handicap of many historical texts in which readers are bogged down with dates and irrelevant detail....
Good stuff.
530) The Wink Of The Zenith/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Few writers have lived exciting lives with Jack London-type adventures. And in Floyd Skloot's latest memoir, The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer's Life, one is given a quiet slice of Americana that is neither extraordinary nor shaped with lyrical passion. But Zenith is much more solidly written than most writers' memoirs - I mean the standard "writer's life" written by yet another upper-middle-class suburbanite complaining about the woes of suburbia. I found it a relief to read here about a real person with real-life issues, rather than the cliched hyperbole found in most writers of the ills (alcoholism, self-indulgence, drug use, etc.) they have brought on themselves....
Solid.
531) W./Film Review/Dan Schneider Oliver Stone’s latest film, W., a seeming semi-satire on only the first term of President George W. Bush (no Hurricane Katrina, no BS on "the Surge has worked," no economic disaster), is a hit and miss affair which, given Stone’s track record in film this decade, is possibly a slight improvement on those earlier films. Recall the deadening mediocrity of U-Turn and utter pointlessness of Any Given Sunday, or the not quite campy enough schlock of Alexander? If you don’t, consider yourself lucky....
Yawn.
532) An Appreciation Of The Songwriting And Music Of John Arthur Martinez/Music Review/Dan Schneider Recently, my wife and I spent a night at a local resort called the Canyon Of The Eagles, northwest of Burnet, Texas. As it was a week before Halloween, things were decked out in orange and black, and faux spider webs abounded. On out first evening there, after we returned from eating in Burnet, at about 7:45 pm, we saw that there was to be a small concert in front of the resort’s restaurant area....
More Good stuff.
533) Sister Carrie/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Sister Carrie is the first novel I’ve read by Theodore Dreiser. Previously, I’d read some of his short stories, which were excellent. I am pleased to say that Sister Carrie does not disappoint, though there are a few things about the book that intrigued me, as well as Dreiser himself as a writer....
Still More Good stuff.
534) Wayfaring At Waverly In Silver Lake/Book Review/Dan Schneider James McCourt is one of those writers who seems to have gotten in print via connections, and the fact that he is a 'gay writer'. I say this because it is the only discernible reason available given his actual writing ability. That said, I had to Google him to find out that he is a 'gay writer', for, thankfully, although he has many ills as a writer, illustrating his sex life does not infect every tale in this book, as it too often does the work of gay writers such as David Leavitt....
Schlock.
535) Obama/Centrist Presidency/Dan Schneider Given Senator Barack Obama's victory over Senator John McCain, last night, now is the time to dispel a few myths about what it all means. But first, let me toot my own horn a bit, for way back in early June I predicted here that the man would win with between 300 and 320 electoral votes; months before others came to a similar feeling. Most pundits foresaw another squeaker, ala 2000 or 2004. I did not; and it seems I was even too cautious. As of this morning, Obama holds a 349-163 electoral vote lead, with only North Carolina's 15 and Missouri's 11 outstanding. It looks like North Carolina will fall into Obama's camp later today, with Missouri too close to call. McCain has a slight lead, but thousands of provisional ballots from urban areas could swing it to Obama, in a week or so. The final tally will likely be 364-174 or 375-163 Obama....
Moving on.
536) Fame/Book Review/Jessica Schneider There are some who need no last names. Paris. Lindsay. Britney. Sadly, just read those three words in context and you likely know the individuals I am speaking about. Why do we know about them, or more importantly, why do we care? Philosopher Mark Rowlands provides readers with an insightful look into what fame is, what motivates it, and how it has, in recent years, evolved. Fame is part of a series called The Art of Living put out by Acumen, and in it Rowlands argues that part of the problem is the culture’s “inability to distinguish quality from bullshit,” hence bringing about the rise of people who are merely famous for being famous....
Good.
537) The Spy Who Came In From The Cold/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Criterion Collection’s latest release is the 1965 black and white spy classic, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, directed by Martin Ritt, whose best known films include the Woody Allen blacklist film, The Front, and the Sally Field union drama, Norma Rae. Like those, this is a very well directed and taut film. And, like those later films, this one also misses out on greatness....
Excellent.
538) Damnation/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Bela Tarr became the most well known Hungarian director of films with the 1987 release of Damnation (Kárhozat). And it’s no wonder. While not an inarguably great film, it is certainly close, and a good case for its greatness can be made. More cogently, the film showed Tarr as a filmmaker who is singular, despite some manifest parallels to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos. This 117 minute long black and white film, shown in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio is similar in structure to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and in pacing to Angelopoulos’s films, although its visual imagery is straight out of the Italian Neo-Realism of the 1940s and 1950s....
Damn good.
539) Man Bites Dog/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The 1992 Belgian mockumentary C’est arrivé près de chez vous / Man Bites Dog (or, somewhat literally, It Happened in Your Neighborhood) is one of those films that is neither bad nor good, and not really its own "thing," either. By that I mean that it is manifestly influenced by works that came before it, so it is nothing original, while also displaying techniques that other films have expanded upon. Yet, since most of these techniques and themes were not originally created within Man Bites Dog, it cannot be said to be influential in its own right. Rather, it is a conduit between other, often better, films....
So-so.
540) Crime And Punishment/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There are perhaps no more valuable publishing houses on the planet than Great Britain's Wordsworth Editions and America's Dover Thrift Editions. In an era where literature is at a low ebb, these two houses have released great works of public domain classic literature at very affordable prices- usually at anywhere from 10-50% off the prices that the same titles can be gotten at larger publishing houses. Among the great titles that I was to get from Dover was Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment, the definitive 1914 Constance Garnett translation....
Masterpiece....not quite.
541) McTeague/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Readers might not know a whole lot about Frank Norris due to his short life (1870-1902), but he is part of that school of modern style writers that include Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane. Annoying purple prose still lingering from the days of the Victorian Era? You will not find that here. Unfortunately, Norris died at the age of 32 due to a ruptured appendix. McTeague is probably the most well known of his works (published in 1899), even though a number of additional titles were published after his death. Now after having read McTeague, I can say that his loss is a greater tragedy for literature - for who knows what additional masterpieces might have awaited him?....
Good.
542) 81/2/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In his 1988 film Another Woman, director Woody Allen has one of his minor characters, named Paul (Harris Yulin), confront the film’s lead character, Marion, played by Gena Rowlands, with a comment that she made upon his attempts at writing. Years earlier, when Paul had shown Marion a manuscript of some of his writing, Marion declared to him, ‘This is overblown. It’s too emotional. It’s maudlin. Your dreams may be….meaningful to you, but to the objective observer….they’re, they’re.…it’s so embarrassing.’ I use this quote from Allen because his underrated 1980 masterpiece, Stardust Memories, arguably the best film he ever made (along with Another Woman and three or four others), is always unfairly negatively compared to Italian New Wave domo Federico Fellini’s 1963 opus 8½ (Otto e mezzo). I think it’s a facile comparison, as well as a wrong one....
Good.
543) The Bicycle Thief/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (Ladri Di Biciclette), made in 1948, in black and white, is one of the all time great films, and, in its Neo-realistic cinema verité simplicity, it shows how utterly creatively bankrupt most filmmaking these days is. And by that I mean worldwide, not just the obvious flaws of the Hollywood crap factory. Lean, spare, poetic- it tells one story, but tells it very well, and that story becomes universal, and is applicable to all people who have ever suffered, or been driven to do desperate things. Its screenplay is deceptively slight, but that does not mean it is not great. Oftentimes, it is assumed that a great screenplay must be witty like Woody Allen films, deep like Ingmar Bergman films, or characteristically complex like Robert Altman films, but great screenplays can also be the antithesis of those things. A great screenplay may be like that in Stanley Kubrick’s for 2001: A Space Odyssey, full of symbolism writ large, and on the other hand, it can be like The Bicycle Thief, which is symbolic precisely because it is so intensely personal....
Great.
544) The Double Life Of Veronique/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The Double Life Of Véronique (La Double Vie De Véronique) is the 1991 French-Polish film by Krzysztof Kieslowski, written by himself and Krzysztof Piesiewicz that was the presage for the greatness of the Three Colors Trilogy (Blue, White, and Red), and was an international sensation at both the Cannes and New York film festivals, for here is where the gilt-hazed camera work of Slawomir Idziak, the music of Zbigniew Preisner (although slyly credited to the fictional Van den Budenmayer in the film- a running joke within Kieslowski’s later works), and Kieslowski’s own vision first touched greatness- even if it is a conditional greatness, more of sensuality than sense. The film has been rhapsodized by international film critics as Kieslowski’s ‘coming out’ film, but one can see it is clearly a bridge between the direction he was headed with his tv series The Decalogue, and where he ended up in the Trilogy....
Misses greatness.
545) Aguirre: The Wrath Of God/Dan Schneider Werner Herzog may just be the best film director of the last forty years. Period. And I mean worldwide. While some directors of film rely primarily on precision- think Alfred Hitchcock, intellect- think Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick, visual poesy-think Terrence Malick, or visceral reaction- think Akira Kurosawa, there is no other major filmmaker that I can think of who combines all of these things so skillfully, as well as having a mastery of music, outside of Herzog. From musical scoring to narrative pacing to visual imagery, he reigns supreme....
Masterpiece.
546) The Philosopher And The Wolf/Book Review/Dan Schneider Philosopher Mark Rowlands is not what one would classically think of as a great writer, in that his prose is not supernally poetic like Loren Eiseley’s, he does not use easily understood but well-targeted metaphors like Stephen Jay Gould, nor does he have the raw power that Friedrich Nietszche did. But he manages to convey highly nuanced and deep concepts in remarkably simple sentences and constructs as he grounds each seemingly pedestrian sentence with its neighbor in ways that crescendo....
Masterful
547) The Wages Of Fear/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Think that space invaders, aliens, dinosaurs, cyborgs, or monsters of one sort or another are needed to make a film a thriller? If so, I recommend you watch Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 black and white masterpiece The Wages Of Fear (La Salaire De La Peur), about the evils of runaway greed and capitalism, all in the name of oil. It’ll change your mind. Over half a century later, and in light of the current American war folly for oil in the Middle East, the film is remarkably resonant and cogent- even down to the loudest criticism of American profiteering and imperialism coming from….the French. However, when they’re right they’re right. If one wants to know why ‘Ugly Americans’ are loathed in the Middle East it’s not because of the rhetorical claptrap about a ‘clash of cultures’, nor Evil vs. Freedom, but because of decades of exploitation where a select group of mainly American corporations, unanswerable to anyone, get rich off of exploiting the masses where they swoop in. It happened in the Middle East, as well as in Latin America- perhaps the only place in the world where anti-Americanism (really anti-American corporate imperialism) rivals or surpasses that in the Middle East. As a minor character in the film rails, ‘Wherever there’s oil, there’s always Americans.’ But, if all this film were was an anti-American screed it would still not grip viewers today. What it is, is a great portrait of the extremes that human beings- ok, men, will go to just to have things, and to what lengths their machismo will drive them....
Underrated greatness.
548) Day Of Wrath/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 film Day Of Wrath (Vredens dag), adapted from Hans Wiers-Jenssens’ novel, Day Of Wrath, by Dreyer, is an earlier, better version of the issues tackled in Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, because, even though the film was made during the Nazi occupation of Denmark, and there are obvious parallels to be drawn between that and the film’s narrative, it is never as psychologically obvious nor melodramatic as Miller’s later allegory on McCarthyism. This is never made more clear than at the film’s end, where the psychologically fragile Anne (Lisbeth Movin) is betrayed by her horrid mother-in-law, her lover, and her own psyche, and actually comes to believe in her own guilt of being a witch, for wishing the death of her aged husband....
Black and white heaven?
549) Deliverance/DVD Review/Dan Schneider New on the Fox Network: When Good Movies Go Bad! Or, a review of John Boorman’s 1972 film Deliverance, which he produced and directed, based upon James Dickey’s 1970 novel of the same name. Dickey also wrote the screenplay, which explains a lot, especially if you are familiar with his ‘poetry.’ The actual look of the film, however, is sensational. The cinematography of nature, by Vilmos Zsigmond, is still stunning after thirty-five years- especially those scenes shot in twilight, dusk, and night, and the first forty-five or so minutes sets the basis of a good tale which could have been something really special. Then, Dickey digs into his own personal bag of fetishes (his most famous poem is The Sheep Child, about bestiality) and latencies and the film becomes an almost nonstop stream of a narrative propelled by the Dumbest Possible Action theory of film....
Oy!
550) Casablanca/DVD Review/Dan Schneider About three years ago I finally gave in to watch It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time. I had hesitated because of the five- and ten-minute snippets of the film I had seen, and for its reputation as a hokey Christmas story ‘chestnut.’ Well, was I wrong, for It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is a truly great film, and arguably the best Frank Capra ever made. It also is a good example of the auteur theory of filmmaking, in that the film fits very well within the Capra canon. From the first five minutes the viewer knows that no one but Frank Capra could have directed it. With that in mind, I decided to finally give in and watch Casablanca from start to finish. Like It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s a film from the 1940s (1942 to be exact) whose hold on audiences has not abated. However, unlike It’s a Wonderful Life, Casablanca often turns up in the Top Ten Greatest Films of All Time lists, and this is wrong — for while Casablanca is overall a good film (I’d give it a 75-80 score out of 100), it is nowhere near greatness for reasons technical, aesthetic, and artistic. I will detail these reasons in this essay, and demonstrate that, while the film is eminently likable, likability and greatness are wholly different qualities that a thing possesses — be that thing a work of art, an idea, or just the execution of a plan....
Overrated.
551) Frenzy/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Have you ever wondered about what a famous artist’s work would be like if they were living in the present age? Imagine Van Gogh living in Los Angeles, or Dante writing of the military debacle in Iraq. Well, imagine what Alfred Hitchcock- either of the early British thrillers or 1950s vintage era Hollywood classics, would be like if he were given a free hand in the 21st Century. Fortunately, cineastes need not strain their imaginations too much, for his penultimate film, 1972’s Frenzy- his first film made in England in over twenty years, gives hints as to what a 21st Century Hitchcock would provide; and it’s assuredly good. In fact, save for a too rushed last fifteen or twenty minutes, it would be the equal of his three or four greatest films....
Better than most of Hitch's films.
552) Satyricon/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The best way to understand director Federico Fellini’s audacious 1968 film Satyricon (also known as Fellini Satyricon, because 1967 saw the release of Satyricon by fellow Italian filmmaker Gian Luigi Polidoro) is within the context of its year of release. That pivotal year saw the release of such indelible film classics as The Graduate, Planet of the Apes, Night Of The Living Dead, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Satyricon is very much in league with all of those films. It is even more sexually daring than The Graduate (especially homosexually), as politically subversive as Planet Of The Apes, as relentless as Night Of The Living Dead, and as far out as 2001: A Space Odyssey. I would also add that it is as symbolic as that landmark of television from the U.K., The Prisoner. But, is it a great film? I’d say no, although it is a very intriguing film, and not nearly as bad a film as its worst critics claim. That said, it is not the cinematic masterpiece its boosters claim, even if it had undoubted influence on such later films as Bob Guccione’s sadomasochistic Caligula....
Better than expected.
553) The Devil In The White City/Book Review/Jessica Schneider The Devil in the White City is a book that my stepfather recommended to me, and my stepfather is someone who reads Jimmy Buffett books, so I did not have high hopes. Yet this is more a disappointment than it is a bad book. It had the potential to be an excellent one, but falls short....
Solid.
554) Ordet/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Denmark’s Carl Theodor Dreyer was one of the great auteurs of early cinema, and such masterpieces as Vampyr and Day Of Wrath attest to that fact. Many critics, however, have hailed either his earlier silent film, The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, or his later Ordet (The Word) as his greatest work, and while I’ve never seen the earlier film in a full reatoration, having just watched Ordet I can say, uncategorically, that it is not in a league with Vampyr nor Day Of Wrath. This is not to say that the film is a bad one, but it is nowhere near a great one....
Good but unsatisfying.
555) Damnation/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Bela Tarr became the most well known Hungarian director of films with the 1987 release of Damnation (Kárhozat). And it’s no wonder. While not an inarguably great film, it is certainly close, and a good case for its greatness can be made. More cogently, the film showed Tarr as a filmmaker who is singular, despite some manifest parallels to the work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Theo Angelopoulos. This 117 minute long black and white film, shown in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio is similar in structure to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and in pacing to Angelopoulos’s films, although its visual imagery is straight out of the Italian Neo-Realism of the 1940s and 1950s....
Damn good.
556) Ikiru/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Ikiru (To Live), by Akira Kurosawa, is sort of a ‘lost’ film. No, it was never really lost, but it is unlike the archetypal Kurosawa film Western audiences think of him making, and thereby lost in his canon. It is not some historical epic filled with honor, samurais, and swordplay. It is more in line with the genre of retrospective life films in the vein of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane or Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, in that we drop in the on the life of an ordinary man- in this case lifelong low level Tokyo city bureaucrat office head Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a few months before his death by stomach cancer, and witness how this ‘living mummy’, as his co-workers chide him (one of the nicer things they say about him), reclaims meaning in a life long since blanched of it. Unlike Charles Foster Kane, a business magnate, or Isak Borg, a renowned Academic, Watanabe is the sort of man most people would ignore....
Magnificent.
557) La Dolce Vita/DVD Review/Dan Schneider La Dolce Vita ( The Sweet Life ), as ironic a title as has ever been used in motion picture history, Federico Fellini’s 1960 film commentary on modern hedonism and anomy, and filmed in 1959 in Rome, may just be the best film in his canon, for it combines the Neo-Realism of earlier classics like La Strada and Nights Of Cabiria, while admixing some of the surreal touches of his later classics. Plus, it is the best written and most ambitious of his films. In many ways, its lead star, Marcello Mastroianni, would play a similar version of this film’s lead character, gossip journalist Marcello Rubini, in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte ( The Night ), which followed the travails of a marriage over a single night. While this film does not follow a marriage, it does follow Marcello’s personal travails over the course of a week full of nights and early mornings- although not necessarily in that order. Otherwise it may have been better titled La Settimana (The Week), or La Vuoto Vita (The Empty Life)....
Masterpiece.
558) Mysterious Skin/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In watching the 2004 drama, Mysterious Skin, by filmmaker Gregg Araki, I was reminded of the old gilding the lily nostrum, in that a little bit less would have been a whole lot more, qualitatively, for this film. This is a very good film that certainly had the potential to be great, but its excesses knock it a notch or two below, just enough that it barely makes the argument for near greatness. On the surface, it may be said to be much like a 1970s ABC Afterschool Special of a film, admixed with a sometimes gratuitous penchant for over the top sexuality. Despite that, however, it does succeed as a teen-based drama in ways that another teen drama, Mean Creek, did not, but also in ways that a similarly themed, and also excellent, film like L.I.E. did not....
Good, but could have been more.
559) Vertigo/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching the films of Alfred Hitchcock reminds one of the fairy tale of Goldilocks And The Three Bears. Not so much in the actual filmic nature of the art, but in the critical reception accorded the films. As example, some of the films that are labeled masterpieces, like Psycho or The Birds, are just right in their assessment. Other films that are critically neglected are, in fact, among Hitchcock’s better films, such as Rope and Frenzy. Then there are the films that are hailed as masterpieces, but which are profound disappointments. If they are not outright bad films, they certainly are only marginally solid films, and achieve their solidity mainly through technical accomplishments. In this category I would place Rear Window and Vertigo....
Overrated.
560) Lolita/Book Review/Dan Schneider Lolita. It’s been on my to read pile for a while now. It is a novel that, with reputation and all, stands as one of the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century. Not that I appeal to authority, but given the book’s literary presence, in no way do I think Lolita qualifies as one of the 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century. It’s a good book certainly, but much of its reputation, I have to believe, is due to the controversial subject matter for its day, as well as critics cribbing from one another their overpraise for the book....
Good stuff.
561) Faces/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Faces, by John Cassavetes, is a 1968 film generally credited as being the first popular independent film in America to make an impact in the public consciousness. But, it is more than that. It is a film that totally subverted the dominant themes and forms of Hollywood cinema, at the time, showed that ‘adult’ films, truly adult, not a euphemism for pornography, could have mass appeal, and paved the way for the great auteur decade of American filmmaking that was the 1970s. That things have regressed severely, since then, only shows how much a young Cassavetes is needed these days....
Great stuff.
562) First Men In The Moon/DVD Review/Dan Schneider The 1964 film version of H.G. Wells’ First Men In The Moon is a film I was never really fond of. Yes, it was directed by the estimable B film legend Nathan Juran, who brought the world such great B film classics as The Brain From Planet Arous, 20 Million Miles To Earth, and The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, but it lacked the great special effects, hamminess, and babeoliciousness of those three films. On top of all that, it lacked the really horrid technical schlockery to propel it to the ‘so bad it’s good’ category either that films like Plan 9 From Outer Space and Robot Monster occupy....
Sci fi mainstay.
563) Blade Runner/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Director Ridley Scott’s dystopian 1982 sci-fi drama Blade Runner is one of those Hollywood productions whose initially mixed reviews were actually closer to the mark than the decades of hagiography that followed. That’s not to say that Blade Runner is a bad film; it’s only a much-ballyhooed mediocrity — due mostly to its sluggish screenplay — rather than a great film. Adapted (by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples) from the equally so-so novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick – a writer whose ideas for stories always outstripped his ability to render them into good prose — Blade Runner pales in comparison to Paul Verhoeven’s later Dick adaptation, Total Recall (1990), as well as to Scott’s prior sci-fi classic, Alien (1979)....
Mediocre.
564) The Whore's Child/Richard Russo/Dan Schneider Perhaps the best way to judge a short story writer is to look at how he ends his tales. If the stories end on a high note, or end well, and leave the reader wanting more, then there's a good chance the whole tale was pretty good. This serves as a good shorthand way for telling if a book of short fiction you are browsing through is worth buying. Just go to the end of the stories and if most are well written, buy the book. With that in mind, I state to you, if you come across Richard Russo's The Whore's Child And Other Stories in a mark down bin, please, just burn this book....
Burn the book!
565) The Easter Parade/Richard Yates/Jessica Schneider Something happens with every Richard Yates book I read. I sit down to read it, and I find myself unable to be pulled away. This first occurred when I read his 1961 gem of a novel Revolutionary Road, and now the same has occurred for his 1976 novel Easter Parade....
Classic.
566) Hobson's Choice/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Having grown up on the more well known films of David Lean, from his 1940s period pieces, like Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, to his famed epics, The Bridge On The River Kwai, Lawrence Of Arabia, and Dr. Zhivago, I was surprised to learn that he even made comedies. In fact, he only made two, 1945’s Blithe Spirit, based on a Noel Coward play, and the film under review, 1954’s Hobson’s Choice (Lean’s last black and white film), based upon a 1916 play of the same title by Harold Brighouse....
Good stuff.
567) Wild Strawberries/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Watching Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries for the first time was an interesting experience because of three reasons. One, the film itself is terrific. Two, I watched it the same night as the 2006 Academy Awards, and was struck by how Bergman’s film never condescends to its viewer, unlike the major nominated Politically Correct films Hollywood churns out and rewards. Three, having always known of Bergman from the films of American filmmaker Woody Allen, I was struck at just how much Allen steals from Bergman in many of his films- from camera angles and techniques, to outright theft of scenes. Not that I am accusing Allen of wrongdoing, for T.S. Eliot basically admitted that if an artist is to steal, they should steal from the greats, and Bergman crafted a great film, rife for purloining, back in 1957....
Great.
568) The Mammy/Book Review/Jessica Schneider The Mammy is the first book in the Agnes Browne trilogy, which deals with a working class Irish family during the 1960s. The book is slim, finishing with large-sized font, just under 175 pages. Agnes Browne is the Mammy the book speaks of — she’s the mother of seven who has found herself recently widowed. Forced to find a way to care for her family, the opening scene involves her going down to the Department of Social Welfare to pick up her check, yet the office has yet to receive her husband’s death certificate (he dies only hours before the book begins). Agnes wastes no time....
Ok.
569) Lonely Planets/Book Review/Dan Schneider Lonely Planets: The Natural Philosophy Of Alien Life, a 2004 book by astrobiologist David Grinspoon, is a terrific science book because it is informative, solidly written, and gives insights into not only history but its writer’s life and philosophy (natural and otherwise). Its only flaw is that it shows some signs of being dated, even just five years on. As an example, Grinspoon declares Mars is likely a dead world, for its lack of water. But, last year, water was indeed discovered on Mars, and far more of it than thought just five years ago. Also, more extrasolar planets have been discovered in the five years since the book’s publication than in the nine from first discovery till then....
Good stuff.
570) Hearts Of Darkness/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Sometimes a film can get a reputation way beyond its worth, yet still be a good film. In watching the DVD release of Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, Eleanor Coppola’s documentary on the making of the war epic Apocalypse Now, by her husband Francis Ford Coppola, this struck me as true. The title of this hour and a half long film, of course, comes from the source material for Apocalypse Now, Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart Of Darkness. While there is no doubt that Apocalypse Now is a great film, the documentary about it is not. Yes, it is a useful and instructive document, but, in many ways, it reminded me of the document about the making of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny And Alexander, which had almost no commentary....
So-so.
571) The Samurai Trilogy/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Hiroshi Inagaki’s 1954-1956 three part color film, The Samurai Trilogy, is unlike many filmic trilogies for the very fact that it is, indeed, one exactly five hour long film, and not three separate linked films, for the first two films have no real endings. In this way it has much in common with The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. However, whereas those three are separate films, more or less, their source work is not. Yes, J.R.R. Tolkien’s book is often printed in three separate volumes, but it is one work. This three part film is also derived from one singular literary work, from Eiji Yoshikawa’s 1935 novel Musashi, loosely based upon the real life 17th Century Japanese folk hero, the samurai Musashi Miyamoto, who penned a classic book called The Book Of Five Rings....
Solid.
572) The Financier/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Greed. Money. Power. Given our current financial times, I am surprised more are not speaking about Theodore Dreiser. The Financier is Dreiser’s 1912 novel following his most well known work, Sister Carrie. The Financier is set during the 1860s and '70s, though little dates the work as a whole, for the lead character, Frank Cowperwood, could be any corrupt CEO living on Wall Street today....
Good read.
573) Diary Of A Country Priest/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Robert Bresson’s 1950 breakthrough film, Diary Of A Country Priest (Journal D’Un Cure De Campagne), is one of those films that is absolutely antithetical to everything a Hollywood film stands for. It is obsessive, detailed, slow, and opaque. This, however, does not mean it is a great film, as so many knee-jerk critics claim it is. It is not; but it is a very interesting film. Ostensibly, it may seem to be a film on religion and/or suffering, or, as film critic Fréderic Bonnard claims, in The Criterion Collection’s DVD essay on the film, a film ‘about imprisonment,’ but it’s neither, really. It’s more cogently a film about masochism, guilt, and pathological privation, although it does touch upon religion, suffering, and imprisonment. The film was not only directed by Bresson (his fourth of thirteen films), but also adapted by Bresson from the 1936 novel of the same title by Georges Bernanos....
Solid.
574) Robinson Crusoe On Mars/DVD Review/Dan Schneider It had been over thirty years since I last saw the 1964 science fiction film Robinson Crusoe On Mars, when I recently watched The Criterion Collection's DVD. I'd only seen it in black and white, and then in a truncated version that cut the brief nude scene. What stuck with me, and struck me again on rewatch, was just how good and emotionally realistic this film was. Yes, the special effects are dated, and the reuse of the flying saucers from The War Of The Worlds (another film by this film's director, Byron Haskin), and there are some clunkier moments, as when the film's lead brandishes a six-shooter rather than a ray gun....
Underrated.
575) Tulips/Sylvia Plath/Jessica Schneider "Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds." This is one of the lines in the poem "Tulips" by Sylvia Plath. Whenever one is analyzing poetry (or any work of art for that matter) it is important to avoid two things: 1) to not become too pedantic in one's approach and 2) continually rely on the artist's biography to fill in details. In the case of Plath, too often critics will rehash the same fodder when it comes to understanding her poetry: that she was depressed, lonely, suicidal, etc. While these factors certainly do work their way into her art, they are not the reasons for why her art succeeds in the ways that it does....
Poetic analysis.
576) Evil Brain From Outer Space/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In all my years watching Gamera and Godzilla films, I thought I had seen all the possible Japanese monster movie variants, but, somehow, this little film slid by my attention. First, while this is technically a review of a DVD, the fact is that I watched this 1956 black and white film on one of those cheapo 50-movie packs from Mill Creek Entertainment, so there was absolutely nothing in terms of extra features. Yet, so what? If one were to expect features for a film that was clearly made for a 1950 television Captain Video And His Video Rangers knockoff for Japan, well, one would be silly....
Good crap.
577) Marnie/DVD Review/Dan Schneider After his back to back commercial and critical triumphs of Psycho and The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock decided to go ‘interior.’ By that, I mean he decided to get unfortunately Freudian in his approach to crime, as he had throughout his career. Unfortunately, all but a few of his films suffer from their reliance on the outmoded and simplistic approaches to psychology that he employed. One of them was Marnie, his 1964 color follow up to the two terrific films mentioned at the start, starring his The Birds female lead, Tippi Hedren....
Ok.
578) A Pure Drop/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Rare is it to have two artists, one a father and the other a son, both who have talent in the same field. Think about it: while there are many offspring who try to follow in their parents' footsteps, the usual occurrence is that the child is nothing but a distant drop of what the parent was, and that is putting it kindly. Examples would be Sylvia Plath and Frieda Hughes, John and Thomas Steinbeck, Anne and Linda Sexton. Even more odd is it to have a parent artist die at the age of 28, only then to have his son die at the age of 30....
Jeff Buckley....still dead.
579) Days Of '36/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos‘ 1972 effort Meres Tou ‘36 / Days of ‘36, winner of the International Film Critics Association award at the Berlin Film Festival, is the least of the several films of his that I’ve seen. It is also, by over a decade and a half, the earliest one I’ve seen so far, and at one hour and 45 minutes it is by a good margin the shortest as well. Days of ‘36 clearly comes across as an ‘early’ work in the artist’s canon because, especially when compared to his later efforts, one can clearly see Angelopoulos being unsure of the potential success of his decisions....
Classic.
580) The Decalogue/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Art that can claim greatness deals with complex issues in complex ways. If the answers or questions posed were simple they could be framed in a single sentence, or a ten second film, then the art would not be its own best explanation. This thought stuck with me as I watched Krzysztof Kieślowski’s complex and fascinating, if flawed, The Decalogue, illuminating aspects of the Ten Commandments from the third, transitional phase of his career, which included this 1988-89 Polish television series, filmed in 1987 and 1988, as well as the two subsequent feature films derived from episodes five and six, A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love. Kieślowski’s filmic career can be divided into four parts....
Good.
581) A Good School/Book Review/Jessica Schneider A Good School is a good, solid novel, but that is about it. While many writers would be so lucky to able to actually have a good novel worthy of publication, A Good School is a bit of a let down, when compared to other works by Yates, but it is still something worth the read....
Good book.
582) Il Generale Della Rovere/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Il Generale Della Rovere was one of Roberto Rossellini’s most successful films commercially, winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and there is a simple reason why. It’s not that good a film. It’s a rather formulaic film, slathered with faux patriotic sloganeering, whitewashed politics, and a rather banal cinematic approach. Rossellini was, along with the film’s star, Vittorio De Sica, one of the two big name directors of what was known as Italian Neo-Realism. But while 1945’s Rome: Open City was also a financial success for Rossellini, he went almost fifteen years between that success and this one, in 1959. De Sica, however, had more commercial and critical success in the interim....
Overrated.
583) Nosferatu, Phantom Of The Night/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Werner Herzog is an artist out of his time….and that’s a very good thing for lovers of great films. His own great 1979 film Nosferatu, Phantom Of The Night (Nosferatu, Phantom Der Nacht), which was released in America as Nosferatu, The Vampire, is less a classic vampire film and more a Post-Apocalyptic tale, having more in common (especially image-wise) with films like On The Beach, The Quiet Earth, the Vincent Price classic The Last Man On Earth (based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend), and even the first Night Of The Living Dead, than with the Hollywood Dracula mythos, and even its silent filmic predecessor, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horrors (Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens), because Herzog is a filmmaker not afraid to turn his camera eye on ugliness, and use that as a way to limn reality better and more clearly in his search for his own ‘ecstatic truth.’ Herzog has always specialized in eye level realism, wherein he generally eschews those glossy gorgeous postcard-like shots that many filmmakers often substitute for depth....
Classic.
584) Cold Spring Harbor/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Little gets past the eyes of Richard Yates. He is a writer who can take a dismal, ordinary set of characters and make them into real, flesh and bone beings, simply by the way he describes their patterns of behavior, their mannerisms, their dialogue. Cold Spring Harbor is his last novel, published in 1986, and it carries with it all the benefits of being a Yates novel: spare yet descriptive, insightful dialogue about seemingly “simple things,” peppered with his acute observational skills for human behavior....
Good.
585) The Dark Knight/DVD Review/Dan Schneider A few years ago, despite repeated critical praise and entreaties from friends and colleagues, I gave up on ever wasting my precious time on earth watching another Steven Spielberg film. Time and again I was told by others, "No, this time I really mean it, it’s a GREAT film," and time and again I would leave the theater angry or nauseous....
So-so.
586) Collected Stories/David Leavitt/Dan Schneider If I told you that a writer was best known for a) having the first published ‘gay’ story in The New Yorker, and b) getting sued by poet Stephen Spender, the most famous poet that no one can remember a line he’s written, for allegedly plagiarizing parts of Spender’s autobiography World Within World for a novel of his called While England Sleeps, what odds would you lay on that writer being any good?....
A hack's hack.
587) Blind Chance/DVD Review/Dan Schneider If you have ever held a pupa in your grip, you know that, if held up to a light, at a certain angle, the fully formed insect can be seen, even though it has yet to emerge. This was the sensation that I had while watching Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1981 film Blind Chance (Przypadek) after having seen his glorious Three Colors trilogy. It is a film that could have been great, had it been made a decade later in Kielsowski’s career, but made when it was it merely has tantalizing glimpses of his later greatness. However, it is, by no means, a bad film, and certainly quite a bit superior to two later films that owe it quite a bit of debt - Germany’s Run, Lola, Run, directed by Tom Tykwer, and Britain’s Sliding Doors - a Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle, directed by Peter Howitt, both from 1998....
Solid.
588) Thames: The Biography/Book Review/Dan Schneider 'Water is permanent; water is destructive; everything returns to its depths." Such is probably the simplest way to sum up Peter Ackroyd's Thames. Ackroyd invites readers to imagine not just a river, but also the idea of a river. With richly organized chapters rife with detail, Ackroyd provides insight on all things Thames: history, geology, mythology, hydrology, and how this all pertains to the larger aspects of culture....
It flows.
589) Help!/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I have never been a huge Beatles fan. I acknowledge them as a fine pop quartet, but I have never swooned over them as the greatest rock band of all time, despite sales records, because they were pop, not rock. Rock was The Who, Led Zeppelin, or The Rolling Stones. But even were one to accept them as the greatest pop group of all time, their film work has to be considered distinct....
It needs it.
590) Spider-Man 3/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There are times when I enjoy being wrong. Not that failure in any field is energizing, but when one is wrong about a presupposition, based upon an especially large body of evidence that seems to support one's bias, it is a positive, especially when that bias was toward the negative. Having recently watched The Dark Knight, and seen that it is a poor followup to Batman Begins, and having seen how well made and written the first two Spider-Man films were (even if the second was not as good as the first), my expectation was that Spider-Man 3 would continue the line of declension downward toward the Hollywood Lowest Common Denominator followed by even the few promising film franchises out there....
Better than advertised.
591) L'Avventura/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Some films that are labeled classics, or great films, are not even good films. Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless immediately comes to mind. Others, like Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, whose title literally means The Adventure, as well as Italian slang for a one night stand, are not necessarily bad, but still only interesting failures, and not worthy of their reputation. L’Avventura was the first in a trilogy of black and white widescreen films Antonioni would make about alienation and personal anomy. The making of such trilogies was the rage at the time in European cinema, and, to an extent, still is. The trilogy was rounded out by La Notte and L'Eclisse in the two following years....
Eh.
592) My Kid Could Paint That/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In a real sense, the 83-minute documentary My Kid Could Paint That is one of the most disgusting films of all time. It disgusts because a) it so vividly displays the utter nonsense and stupidity of the modern art scamming that has gone on for the last half century or more (especially in Abstract Expressionism) — and that’s a good thing; and b) it so vividly displays the exploitation of an innocent child, Marla Olmstead, to meet the personal and psychological demands and needs of her Mark and Laura — and that’s a bad thing....
Nailing more art frauds.
593) La Notte/DVD Review/Dan Schneider La Notte (The Night), the 1961 film by Michelangelo Antonioni, and the second of his Alienation Trilogy, after L’Avventura and before L’Eclisse, is a huge artistic leap up from its predecessor film. It’s not so much that L’Avventura was such a bad film- it’s not. It has its moments, and a good premise that swiftly decays into anomie and melodrama, whereas La Notte, even at an hour and fifty-five minutes in length, is a highly focused, layered, and concentrated, adult drama about the ennui that occurs in a marriage of dilettantes where all of one’s life has been plotted out beforehand, yet happiness still eludes its participants. Yet, La Notte is not Italian neorealism, in the vein of what dominated that country’s cinema in the prior decade, and this is clear from this film’s opening shots, of slowly scaling down the side of a skyscraper to the strains of an otherworldly jazz-like score....
Masterpiece.
594) A Tragic Honesty/Book Review/Jessica Schneider To say that Richard Yates lived a troubled life would be an understatement. In fact, after learning of his life, it is easy to see just where he got all his material, and why he writes so well about alcoholics. In many ways his troubles were not only cliché (the tortured, depressed, lonely, mentally unstable, financially struggling artist that no one appreciates or understands), they were also self-induced....
Pass the scotch!
595) L'Eclisse/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (The Eclipse), his 1962 black and white capstone of his Alienation Trilogy that began with L’Avventura and continued with La Notte, is arguably a great film, but still a cut or two below its immediate predecessor, the indisputably brilliant La Notte, simply because it lacks the story and excellent portrayal of a human relationship that that earlier film has. It is, however, a superior film to L’Avventura, in that its sustains it sublime weirdness and disaffecting qualities throughout the film, whereas that first film in the trilogy petered out into a dull ending after an intriguing and mysterious premise....
Classic.
596) Wild Man Blues/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Barbara Kopple’s 1998 documentary on filmmaker Woody Allen’s 1996 tour of Europe with his New Orleans Jazz Band (reputedly 18 concerts, and seven countries, in 23 days), Wild Man Blues, is one of the most pointless, dull, and utterly inert documentaries I’ve ever seen. I’ve long been a fan of Allen’s films, and even his worst films (see The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion) are a cut or three above their typical Hollywood counterparts. And Kopple is a noted documentarian of quality (see Harlan County, USA). But, this film is nothing but a manifest ploy to rehabilitate the man’s image after his 1991 scandal of splitting up with actress Mia Farrow and shacking up with her daughter....
Ugh.
597) Ugetsu/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari), a 1953 film by Kenji Mizoguchi, which won the Venice Film Festival’s top prize (the Silver Lion Award for Best Direction) that year, is one of the best films to ever deal with the subject of human desire, and not only the obvious sexual aspects of the emotion. While ostensibly it is labeled a ghost story, since its Japanese title means Tales Of The Pale And Silvery Moon After The Rain, the story is a complex one that hides behind its astonishingly simple narrative and revelation, and is based upon two tales from a 1776 book of tales by Ueda Akinari, and a third story from French writer Guy de Maupassant. Mizoguchi and screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda adapted elements from all three tales to create something new and relevant....
Greta film.
598) Fiction/Book Review/Jessica Schneider In reading the sophomore novel by ara 13, my reaction was (while reading it) that I’d not ever read anything quite like it before. Fiction is actually a work of metafiction, and while I have read other metafictional books in the past, Fiction is unusual in its narrative approach and style - and I mean that as a good thing. Although it is difficult to pinpoint any particular writer 13’s novel reminds me of, I would have to say the closest thing might be Nathanael West, albeit 13 tends to veer off into more philosophical elements than West does, though both writers share a certain element of humor....
Ara what?
599) Carson McCullers/Book Review/Dan Schneider In reading The Collected Stories Of Carson McCullers I was expecting good, and possibly great, things. After all, her first published novel, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter is a near great novel. However, this collection of twenty-one pieces proves that McCullers was better in the longer forms of fiction, and, at best, mediocre in the short story form. This is in keeping with the fact that few artists can excel to the point of greatness, in more than one art, or even in more than one genre in the art....
Good, not great.
600) The Limey/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Director Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 so-called crime drama The Limey is easily the best Soderbergh effort I’ve seen. That’s partly due to the innovative narrative structure, which makes all but the last few minutes of this great film a flashback. The rest is due to an excellent script by Lem Dobbs, whose other great success came a year earlier, in Alex Proyas’ sci-fi thriller Dark City. Both films, despite their apparent differences, are acutely focused on human memory and both deal with the fragility of such in novel ways....
A masterpiece.
601) The Golden Notebook/Book Review/Jessica Schneider There is an old joke among writers, poets mainly, about how one of the worst types of poems is that which involves a speaker talking about sitting in a caf writing a poem about writing a poem. The Golden Notebook is essentially the novel equivalent of that; only this is about a writer trying to write a novel. Although Lessing is a much more skilled writer than many of those young poets who write poems about writing poems, The Golden Notebook is a novel which takes risks yet fails at them....
Solid.
602) Fidel Castro, My Life/Book Review/Jessica Schneider There are many different ways one could approach when reviewing this book. On one hand, it's an excellent source when thinking of Fidel Castro. Not so much because of historical and objective accuracy, but one of Castro's character. On the other hand, could one claim this a pleasant read? Unless you are just a die-hard Fidel fanatic, I think most readers would find this boring....
Ok.
603) Betty Smith Biography/Book Review/Jessica Schneider "And without true modesty, I am a world famous writer. A hundred years after I'm dead, people will still be reading, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."' -Betty Smith in a letter to her granddaughter Although a hundred years has not passed since Betty Smith's death in January of 1972, as of yet she seems to have been right in her assessment. With more than 35 years since her death, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn has elevated into the rankings as one of the greatest classics of all time....
Quality stuff?
604) The Seventh Seal/DVD Review/Dan Schneider One of the things that separates a great artist from a lesser one is his ability to switch forms, themes, and the like, yet still imprint that unmistakable essence that lets a viewer know which artist they are dealing with immediately. Rarely has there been a greater and more vivid example of this reality than in comparing the two films Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman released in 1957: The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries....
Classic.
605) Climates/DVD Review/Dan Schneider 2006’s Climates (Iklimler, literally Weather Conditions) is the third film of Turkish director and screenwriter Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s that I’ve seen, and it is the first one in which he has starred in as an actor. Each of the films has gotten better than its predecessor, and, since his previous film, Distant, touched greatness, Climates had its work cut out for it; but it succeeded....
Great weather?
606) Stroszek/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There has never been a filmmaker remotely like Werner Herzog. He blends fiction and nonfiction in ways no filmmaker before or since has done, and almost always it works, and works exceedingly well. Who else could craft memorable films with the psychotic actor Klaus Kinski? Make a ‘science fiction’ documentary (Lessons of Darkness) about the burning oil wells of Gulf War One? Craft an oddly moving, if undefinable film (Even Dwarfs Started Small) using a cast comprised solely of midgets and dwarfs? Make Count Dracula seem pathetic (Nosferatu the Vampyre)? Make a man obsessed with moving a boat over a mountain into one of film’s great achievements (Fitzcarraldo)? Or make a film (Grizzly Man) about an idiot who is so dumb he gets eaten alive by the grizzly bears he seeks to "protect," and make it work? No one....
Cool.
607) Satantango/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In 1994, Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr released a seven hour black and white film called Satantango (Satan’s Tango in English) that presented a conundrum for both the purveyors of plot-driven, character-empty Lowest Common Denominator blockbuster action summer movies and those who favor the cerebral, pretentious, film school fawning indulgences of Eurotrash (aka World Cinema) filmmaking. The conundrum was how can time be manipulated by the artist (filmmaker) so that the viewer (percipient) is removed from its passage? No, that theme is never directly stated nor implied in the film’s frames, but it is there, and Satantango is a film that, like Chris Marker’s La Jetee, will stand as a milestone in cinema history. Like Marker’s film, Satantango is a great film, and I will detail and argue such in this essay. But, I believe that it could well be the sort of film that, decades hence, serves as the template for what remains of modern cinema culture....
Masterpiece.
608) Dark City/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Australian filmmaker Alex Proyas’s 1998 film Dark City has been compared to many prior science fiction films, from Metropolis to Blade Runner, but, simply put, it’s better than those films. The comparison to Blade Runner, especially, is inapt, because that film is all style and little substance -- a claim made of Dark City, but, in truth, the film is mostly substance, with style about the edges. Yet, the style is so memorable that viewers and critics have had a hard time realizing it is a film that is original fiction, and not based upon a comic strip, as the urban legend goes....
Great.
609) Shadows/DVD Review/Dan Schneider In many ways, the filmic career of independent filmmaking legend John Cassavetes is the polar opposite of someone like Alfred Hitchcock, the consummate studio director. Where Hitchcock infamously treated his actors as cattle, Cassavetes sought to work with them improvisationally. Where every element in a Hitchcock shot is composed immaculately, Cassavetes cared less for the way a scene was figuratively composed than in how it felt, or what it conveyed, emotionally. Hitchcock’s tales were always plot-first narratives, with the human element put in the background. Cassavetes put the human experience forefront in every one of his films. If some things did not make much sense logically, so be it....
Good.
610) It Came From Beneath The Sea/DVD Review/Dan Schneider I looked through one of my DVD sets, Columbia Pictures’ "The Fantastic Films of Ray Harryhausen, Legendary Science Fiction Series," and plucked an old fave of mine to rewatch: the 78-minute, black-and-white, 1955 classic It Came from Beneath the Sea. While not one of the more hyped Ray Harryhausen productions, this sci-fi effort is still a cut above the usual drive-in fare of that era. As a plus — drum roll — it stars Faith Domergue, the goddess of Cold War era sci-fi flicks such as This Island Earth and Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet....
Classic sci fi.
611) Tokyo Story/DVD Review/Dan Schneider There are many roads to greatness. This is a notion that I have always held to be true. No greater example of this could be given than by comparing the films of two of the greatest filmmakers from Japan. Of course, most people have heard of Akira Kurosawa and his classics like Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Ikiru. But there is also Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963), whose canon of films is set in modern times far more often than Kurosawa’s....
Classic.
612) American Hunger/DVD Review/Jessica Schneider Imagine reading a great classic novel like Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and then reading "a follow up story" about Francie Nolan in later years. How can a writer expect to have a successful follow up of what already is a great work, and expect it to match that of the original? Such is the case with Richard Wright’s American Hunger, a slim, 146-page continuation of his great classic memoir, Black Boy....
So-so.
613) The Cyclist/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 1987 picture The Cyclist (Bicycleran) is one of those odd little films (a mere 78 minutes in length) that, technically, is not that impressive, but whose narrative makes it worth watching. Makhmalbaf wrote and directed the film, and also may have edited it. Its technical merits are few, save for the spare screenplay. There are, however, no greatly structured scenes, no effects of any note, and the most interesting shots are those of the lead character on his bicycle and another character riding a motorbike around and around in a pit....
Solid.
614) Three Monkeys/DVD Review/Nuri Bilge Ceylan Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of the current Big Three film giants of Europe in that he is a throwback to the days of visionary directors like Stanley Kubrick, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Andrei Tarkovsky. Along with Greece’s Theo Angelopoulos and Hungary’s Bela Tarr, Ceylan has grown into a rarefied stratosphere, and his last film, 2006’s Climates, was a masterpiece....
Disappointing.
615) Melvin Goes To Dinner/DVD Review/Dan Schneider On the down side is the fact that the 2003 film Melvin Goes To Dinner, directed by first timer Bob Odenkirk, is a watered down yuppy version of the great 1981 Louis Malle film My Dinner With Andre. On the up side is that if you are going to imitate something, at least choose something great, for the imitation, while not great, is likely to be good, which My Dinner With Melvin is. It was written by actor/playwright Michael Blieden, adapted from his play Phyro-Giants, and had a no name cast, as opposed to 2001’s similarly themed HBO film Dinner With Friends, which starred Dennis Quaid, Toni Collette, Andie McDowell, and Greg Kinnear....
Solid.
616) Seductive Poison/Book Review/Jessica Schneider Jonestown. Most of us who were alive during that time remember something. I was only two and a half in November of 1978, though that did not stop me from having nightmares involving “the scary dark haired man in sunglasses.” Deborah Layton’s Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the People's Temple, published over a decade ago, gives a first hand account of what The Peoples Temple, Jim Jones and the nightmarish Jonestown were like, followed with her means for escape, and her eventual reporting of Jones....
Kool!
617) Thumbsucker/DVD Review/Dan Schneider Thumbsucker is the first film made by indy director Mike Mills, in 2005, and it’s a solid film, but nowhere near as good as one might presume according to its plaudits. The story was adapted from an autobiographical 1999 novel by Walter Kirn, and while it is uniformly well acted the basic problem is that it is yet in another of the series of ‘American suburbia is hell’ films. Given the last few years of terrorism and war this simply does not resonate as strongly as it did a decade or so ago, and even then the horrors of being well-fed, having a good roof over one’s head, and having to listen to one’s parents was, to say the least, a tad overdone....
Solid.
618) Disturbing The Peace/Book Review/Dan Schneider This is the fifth novel from Richard Yates I’ve read, and although I still have two more to go, I am wondering if Yates is merely a “Two Hit Novel Novelist,” with his greatest homeruns being Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade. Granted, anyone will tell you that two hits is better than one (or like many fiction writers today: none), but Yates, along with Kazuo Ishiguro and Milan Kundera, seems to have so far achieved two great novels, while the rest of the books by those writers remain near misses....
Ok.
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