Browsing: Home Entertainment

Home Entertainment
0

The Flaw comes on strong like a blaxploitation film with walleyed shots of cityscapes driven by the funky grooves of the street. This is a documentary that wants your attention, and in its fun populist methods it creates an easily accessible portrait of the fatal flaws inherent in our global economic structure. It is filled with well-armed economic theorists that lay down the reasons for recent economic crises, the impossibility of infinite growth, and the impact that these course corrections have on a population for reasons outside of their knowledge and control. It’s no fun when Adam Smith’s invisible hand pulls down your pants and smacks you on the ass, but these short term course corrections are going to happen as long as there are people that continually push their luck for tangible short-term gains. Unfortunately, this type of stupidity might be inherent in the human condition and no one can truthfully claim complete immunity to intellectual myopia.

Home Entertainment
0

The image of the train is that most cinematic of devices, rumbling in as it carries a dark stranger (U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jr.) to a sleepy town to engage in misdeeds that only happen in the movies. The train is a complete sensory package as the reflections bounce apathetically off of the windows, giving a character one of the few luxurious means to be transported to a new locale with adequate time to contemplate where they’ve been. The mechanical orchestra clambers on, carrying with it a lifetime of connection to cinema as the two have been inseparable since their respective births. It is the perfect cinematic device as it (like narrative cinema) is only capable of moving forward on its tracks. There is no sense of past with the arrival of a train, save for the hushed whispers of the brakes that hiss with ignored warnings. Like the complicated lives of the mysterious strangers they carry across the countryside, in both narrative film and trains there is only now.

Home Entertainment
0

I hadn’t intended to sit through a second viewing of Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey in preparation for this DVD review. I felt that I had a solid foundation on which to establish my review and had only popped in the DVD to find out what extras NewVideo had in store for me. I was immediately and unexpectedly pulled back into the wonderful world of Kevin Clash, and his infectious enthusiasm and passion for his craft roped me in for a second viewing, putting me well past any reasonable expectations for a good night’s sleep.

Home Entertainment
0

A pastiche of fast-cut sequences kicks off our journey into the uncertain world of Giuseppe Capotondi’s The Double Hour. This is a film well versed in cinematic shorthand, and condenses the lives of our two protagonists into succinct packages that give us a cohesive mental image of the world our characters’ occupy. After it has established a rudimentary overview of the lives and spaces of its two pivotal characters, the film jumps to a speed dating session that succinctly captures their multifaceted personalities as they go through each short dating encounter and react in facial expressions and brief exchanges of words.

Home Entertainment
1

Roger Corman is one of the most important figures in the history of American cinema. His business minded approach to creating popular films combined with his personal philosophies to create unique works of art that would be largely marginalized or completely dismissed as trash. It is when you take in to consideration the social climate during his most prolific periods that you can begin to formulate a larger picture of the importance of Corman’s work. Exploitation and trash films are largely ignored and disregarded in cineaste culture, but those kinds of films offer a unique look in to the social conditions of the time of their creation. If exploitation cinema exists to give the viewer what they truly want to see in the darkest recesses of their subconscious, then the ability to put a finger on that pulse to create populist art that taps in to those secret desires and unspoken taboos requires unrestrained cultural acumen and the skill to put that acumen to work. Corman had the ability to capture what it was that we actually wanted to see, not what we fooled ourselves in to believing we wanted to see. We might not have the capacity for introspective honesty, but Corman had the ability to look at the cultural climate and distill all of it in to what would be classified as lowbrow art. If one of the primary functions of art is to reflect the nature of humanity, then the entirety of our nature must be captured, whether it be “high art” or “lowbrow”.

Home Entertainment
0

Romantics Anonymous is another in a long line of contemporary French romance fairytales, and occupies a wonderful universe where Chocolatiers are regarded as celebrities and hopeless romantics attend support groups. The film manages to walk a fine line between mildly charming and overly precious and manages to keep itself somewhat grounded by the painful emotions of reality. It is a difficult balancing act, but the film manages to keep its head in the clouds with its feet on the ground without being overly cloying. It is in the personality idiosyncrasies of its two lovers that the film brings the classic romantic fairytale structure in to modern society, whether through Jean-Ren’s antisocial personality defects that drive his crippling shyness, or through Angelique’s low sense of self worth; they are both broken byproducts of modern society, but are able to find common ground and universal beauty through their shared love of immaculate chocolate.

Home Entertainment
0

There’s a storm coming and we have no idea how powerful it is going to be when it gets here. The indications are all around us, with the shaking of the leaves on every tree and with the weight of every black raindrop. We can’t place the origins of this omnipresent dread, and we don’t remember life being this terrifying, but this is what happens when you have children. Your darkest fears will manifest themselves in your thoughts, and there will be no avoiding their weight because this is no longer about us, this is about our children. Children are the unlucky recipients of our neurotic quirks and illogical fears as we are hit with an overwhelming sense of powerlessness as soon as they enter our lives. Some of us are better able to process these emotions, but for some these emotions can trigger long dormant mental idiosyncrasies that loom just below our contrived exterior.

Home Entertainment
0

Once upon a time in cinema, there was a bad film about an irritatingly over-zealous priest and a low-rent Kiefer Sutherland that took a male bonding trip down a river. The priest went out of his way to be annoying for nearly an hour, when finally a pair of strange Japanese girls and their black companion come along and blow up the head of the only non-irritating character in the film. The film made ham-fisted attempts at self-reflexivity in order to provide context for its lack of meaning through the retelling of urban fables that give no conventional storybook endings or greater meaning. It gives excuses for its lack of a traditional structure with its brief and jarring time-outs from the narrative to have one of its characters recount some idiotic urban fable. This sets up the pretense that the film is all about the journey, and one shouldn’t dig too deeply for metaphorical fool’s gold. The film found itself to be far more amusing and confrontational than I did, and it seemed quite pleased with itself in how far “out there” it was. The film knew it wasn’t really going anywhere, but it treated that fact as a virtue under the misguided notion that this sort of self-reflexivity was clever or original.

Home Entertainment
3

This is what happens when youthful idealism grows old and starts to notice the wrinkles on its face that force one to accept their own mortality. Age also allows one to realize that sins cannot be repaid in blood, and the atrocious acts that were committed by Doctor Birkenau can never be undone. Those acts have left a permanent mark on the very faces and souls of these ex-Mossad agents, but even the death of the Doctor will never completely heal the permanent imprints of his atrocities. By this time he would surely be a withered shell of a man, haunted by his own demons and contending with his own mental deterioration caused by the ravages of old age. While it was once in everyone’s best interest (including Doctor Birkenau’s) to maintain the lie and take it with them to the grave, it would appear that his mind has slipped and he has apparently revealed his identity to a news reporter, bringing back to light an unpaid debt that had spanned thirty years and defined every aspect of the three would-be assassins’ lives.

Home Entertainment
0

Is there anything worse than being a teenager?

It’s so awkward. Try to remember being a teenager. The way you felt. The way you acted. The way you moved. The way you could feel everyone judging you, even though they were probably worried you were judging them. How you had that carnal knowledge, but didn’t have a clue of what to do with it as your mind and body go bonkers.

There’s a twisted logic in casting a bunch of amateur teenagers in a dance as surreal and preoccupied by gender identity as “Kontakthof,” by choreographer Pina Bausch. That’s exactly what happened during the filming of 2010 German documentary Dancing Dreams, directed by Rainer Hoffmann and Anne Linsel.

1 … 13 14 15 16 17