Tag Archives: cinema
It’s Not You, It’s Charlie Kaufman
Ghosts Are Us: Charlie Kaufman’s new film is difficult and unique, but is it any good? Charlie Kaufman’s having a busy summer: his debut novel, Antkind was released in July and his latest directorial effort comes to Netflix this Friday. Kaufman adapted I’m Thinking of Ending Things from lain Reid’s novel of the same name. [...]
Mon Ami, Mekas
Filmmaker, poet, critic and philosopher Jonas Mekas passed away on January 23 at the age of 96. The wildly creative and willfully cantankerous Mekas was a champion of experimental cinema and a film critic whose taste and style was ahead of its time. Mekas is credited with getting Andy Warhol to try his hand at [...]
Cinema de la Sandra
Over the October season of horror I was watching lots of classic monsters and murder flicks and my wife and I also binged on old YouTube videos from the various Joe Bob Briggs’ movie series which featured the eponymous Joe Bob presenting films like a 1990s version of classic horror hosts of the 1960s and [...]
Experimental Defiance
The Defy Film Festival returns to Studio 615 in East Nashville this weekend. With that in mind I wrote this primer on experimental film for this week’s The Contributor. Pick up a paper from your neighborhood vendor! What we talk about when we talk about experimental film In the most general sense the term “experimental [...]
Midnight Express at 40
The high point of cinema so far has been the American films made between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. Roughly speaking, these dates constitute the New Hollywood period when failing studios turned to young, maverick directors influenced by the anarchistic re-making of genre cinema by European directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. [...]
Pictures of Lilly
The name John Lilly might conjure many images: scientist; physician; the inspiration behind William Hurt’s character in the psychedelic cinema classic Altered States; don’t forget dolphin whisperer. John Lilly contained multitudes and I was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon this look back at the man and his work from the Stuff To Blow Your Mind [...]
Merry McChristmas
If you’re a reader of this blog you know that I’m fascinated by the occult and the darker sides of the paranormal. I love the skanky, gritty American cinema of the 1970s, and I’m enamored with the disturbing art of painters like Bosch and Bacon. That said, I’m a sucker for Christmastime. I love everything [...]
Stephen’s Suffering Screens
Now that the new IT film has become a huge hit I thought I’d follow-up on my post about the movie last week. I’m not surprised that the film has done as well as it has, and I’m also not surprised to hear that the movie’s success has lead to another King property getting snatched-up [...]
Jarman’s Jubilee
This year we celebrate the 75th birthday of British filmmaker Derek Jarman. Jarman was born on January 31, 1942. I’m always discovering and then keeping tabs on these timely anniversaries of our countercultural forebears, and I’m happy to highlight this one even if I’m getting to it about 7 months too late. The good news [...]
PSH at 50
I recently got on a kick of remembering the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman before I realized that I’d missed the chance to observe what would have been the actor’s 50th birthday on July 23. Most of Hoffman’s fans didn’t know that he’d struggled with substances in his early 20s. And it came as a [...]
