1st Henry Selick
Happy Christmas Eve, everyone! I was invited back onto the Autism Through Cinema podcast a month ago to record their Christmas episode. This time, we talked about The Nightmare Before Christmas, its relationship to autism, the wonders of animation and the aesthetics of a pleasurable fear. Stay tuned for the end to hear my Santa Claus impression, and let me know what you think if you listen to it! You can find a link to it here!…
Hooptober 8.0, pt.7- In which Ethan goes looking for a book on black magic but accidentally finds Gilles Deleuze instead
6/6 Countries (Australia, Belgium, UK, USA, Japan, Italy) (COMPLETE)
5/8- Decades (1980s, 2010s, 1960s, 1990s, 1970s)
2/4- Films from 1981
1/2- Haunted House Films
6th Lucio Fulci (after Don't Torture a Duckling, A Cat in the Brain, The House by the Cemetery, The Black Cat and City of the Living Dead, followed by A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, Zombie…
2nd Béla Tarr (after The Man From London)
Really, this film doesn't have a plot, despite what the description likes to say about a man falling for a singer and the husband who gets between them. Ignore that. This is the story of a town that's given up on life. A character remarks that "the fog gets into your soul" and nothing could be more accurate; everyone walks around in a depressive stupor. There's little work except the bar and…
13th David Cronenberg (after Scanners, Dead Ringers, The Dead Zone, The Fly, Videodrome, Fast Company, Shivers, The Brood, Crimes of the Future, Stereo, Secret Weapons and Naked Lunch)
I adore cars, but nowhere along the line have I ever wanted to fuck around one. Glacially paced, sure, but with a cold intellectualism that is fascinating to witness and brilliantly turned out. It's one of the few films where violence against automobiles is completely understandable, for in the twisting of metal…
4th Michael Haneke (after Caché, Code Unknown and The Seventh Continent)
A damning study of what happens when emotional repression is allowed to fester. That’s not a comment on Erika’s sexual desires but more the manner in which they manifest and the behaviour she exhibits to those around her, sexual or otherwise. Trapped in a tiny apartment with her smothering, domineering mother, Erika is painfully stunted, projecting her deep dysfunction as an open hostility and contempt for everyone around her.…
1st Georges Franju
Franju described this as 'Horror in homeopathic doses', one that is interested in a quiet sense of anguish rather than hair-raising fear and revulsion, and he is absolutely right. Eyes Without a Face is an anti-romance, a film where any sentiment has been stifled by the crushing selfishness of Doctor Génessier, Pierre Brasseur's unbelievably arrogant surgeon. A fair cry from the lively bon vivant the Collab saw in Children of Paradise, Génessier is a vast, imposing figure,…
