Blogging Hiatus (kind of)...

It looks like Ken Russell won the blog poll for my next director retrospective. I have loaded up the Netflix queue with Russell films, and I will begin viewing those shortly. However, when I actually post stuff will be sporadic at best. In fact, I have decided use this retrospective -- and the breadth of Russell's oeuvre -- as a way to get out of doing a second Italian horror-themed blogathon. For those of you that don't know, I am an educator; actually, I think of myself as more of a social worker considering the the type of students I felt a...

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Only one day left to vote!

On the right side of my blog you will see a poll. This poll was created to give you, my dear readers, the power to tell me what you want to read about for my next director retrospective. So...if you haven't voted yet all I can is this: What are you waiting for! The race is tight (I'm a little shocked there's no love for Hal Ashby), and it appears that right now Ken Russell is going to win this thing, but Peter Weir has caught up a bit, and Nicolas Roeg is starting to creep up there, too. Only 26 people have voted so get on it, people! Once the...

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"Boardwalk Empire"...the best film of the year?

[I'm hoping to do these quick and dirty posts on what I liked most about each episode every Monday. For detailed episode recaps, which these posts of mine will not be, you should read Edward Copeland's wonderful blog. His summation of the pilot episode can be found here. Keeping in the spirit of what Jim Emerson has been proposing over at his blog (essentially that television is doing cinema better than cinema these days), "Boardwalk Empire" may just be the best "film" I see this year. I'm extremely...

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Oliver Stone: Nixon

[This is the final installment of my look at the films of Oliver Stone from 1986-1995. I've placed a convenient little pole on the right side of the blog for you all to partake in. That's right, I'm giving you the power to decide what I watch and write about for the next director retrospective! Hehe. Exciting, I know. So, be democratic and vote!] And so we come to the end of this "retrospective". Yes, retrospective is in quotes because I was only ever interested in covering the years when Stone's...

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Oliver Stone: Natural Born Killers

After the box office failure of Heaven and Earth Oliver Stone was crushed. His final entry into his Vietnam trilogy – his most impassioned labor of love – was met with resounding apathy from the critical and commercial masses, and all he wanted to do was make a straight-forward action film with an easy shooting schedule after the grueling experience of filming on location in Saigon for Heaven and Earth. What Stone found was a script by then-plucky up-and-comer Quentin Tarantino (who at the time...

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David Cronenberg Blog-a-thon: Videodrome

[This post is part of the David Cronenberg Blog-a-thon going on right now at Tony Dayoub's site Cinema Viewfinder. Check out the comments for this piece here] What is probably one of the most unconventional horror films ever made, David Cronenberg's Videodrome is, perhaps, only matched by David Lynch's Blue Velvet as one of the oddest, most surreal horror experiences I've ever seen. Cronenberg's film is akin to Lynch's in the sense that both films sit on the fringes of horror (using the prototype...

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Oliver Stone: Heaven and Earth

Sandwiched between Stone's two craziest and most manic films lay one of the auteur's more visually poetic and interesting films; Heaven and Earth isn't something so different that it stands out – although it's nice to see Stone stretch himself a bit here by having the film being told through the eyes of a female protagonist – and it falls too often into ridiculous melodrama to be emotionally memorable. But if you can get past some of the film's major flaws (the film, based on two books by the...

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Winter’s Bone

Unlike Precious and Frozen River (the latter I enjoyed for its performances), Winter's Bone feels lived-in; it doesn't feel like the filmmakers are above the material judging it, smugly proud of the way their exploiting their marginalized, poverty stricken characters for the sake of impressing the Sundance crowds in the name of "understanding these characters" or "showing us a world we've never seen before because we're too concerned with our own lives to look worry about it." Meth is a driving...

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Oliver Stone: JFK

After the lukewarm reaction to The Doors, Oliver Stone needed to rejuvenate the quiescent angst that had been on display in his earlier films like Salvador and Born on the Fourth of July. Stone wanted to fashion a film – what he would call a "counter-myth" – about what he perceived as the conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy. Molding his screenplay in the style of Z and Rashomon, Stone created JFK; a procedural unlike any I've ever seen. Thanks to Stone's amazing ensemble cast (as Craig...

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Oliver Stone: The Doors

I remember seeing tons of shows as a teenager where I would gladly be packed shoulder to shoulder with other sweaty music fans – packed like sardines – waiting for a band or musician to come on stage and give us a show. I was always adamant about seeing bands that did something different live than what they would do on their albums; after all, if I wanted to hear the same thing I would save my money and just listen to the album. Standing there for hours with complete strangers, swaying back and...

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