"Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled."
Before I got married, I taught myself a card trick to perform after hours at my wedding. I've always loved magic tricks, and I thought what better excuse to perform one for my friends and family. I would often begin the trick by telling people that I have a bad poker…
"The screen is only a surface. If an image, by itself, clearly illustrates something, if it contains an interpretation, it won't transform when in contact with other images. The other images will be powerless over her, and it will be powerless over the other images. No action or reaction. It's definitive and useless in the system of cinema."
Histoire(s) du Cinéma is hard to describe. The best I've come up with is to call it cinematic scrapbooking: it's a beautiful…
"The only thing I did wrong was to yearn for someone to caress me and kiss me."
Elvira, the protagonist of In a Year with 13 Moons, is an unavoidably complex character. Born male, she got married and had a child before having "everything cut off down there," after which she changed her name to Elvira, began wearing women's clothes and referring to herself with feminine pronouns, and generally presented herself to the world as a woman. As such, to…
"It's your turn to experience what it feels like to get shot by a friend."
Full Contact feel first and foremost like a distillation of the testosterone-fueled 80's actioner: everything is big and loud and sexy and violent, often all at the same time. The film opens on a robbery orchestrated by flamboyantly gay villain Simon Yam (who almost feels like an inspiration for Willem Dafoe's character in The Boondock Saints but criminal instead of cop) in which Bonnie Fu…
"Hey pretty girl, time to wake up."
There was a time not too long ago when if you asked me what my favorite movie was I might have told you Mulholland Drive. There's a lot going on in the film and I certainly won't claim to understand all of it (something I might have done when it was my "favorite movie"), but I do have a reading of it that seems to answer a lot of the questions it poses,…
In a selfish attempt to cope with his separation anxiety, a sociopathic student abuses his relationship with his mentally unstable best friend in order to throw his future away on a single day of raucous debauchery.
