There is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there?
Eleven viewings later and still as fresh as ever, Videodrome is quite possibly the best film ever made about the relationship between viewers and what they view. The film's most iconic image is James Woods sticking his head inside a television set during a hallucination - an image that very much embodies what it feels like to be totally immersed in a film or a television program: the tendency…
Alexander does not wish the bishop a good night.
This five-hour coming-of-age drama from Ingmar Bergman is so rich in themes and ideas that it is nearly impossible to sum up in one sentence. It is mostly though a tale of a young boy with an overactive imaginative who learns to stand up for himself and view himself as his own person when taken away from his family in which he is only one of many. Indeed, while the first…
Soldiers with nothing to kill - except time.
Working as a battalion clerk at a US base in Germany, an army conscript has a lucrative gig in buying and selling supplies on the black market, however, the arrival of a new superior officer puts his side business in jeopardy in this army comedy starring Joaquin Phoenix. The film gets off to a terrific start with Phoenix experience surreal nightmares of falling through the air with lots of dark comedy as…
Use your tricks in the USSR. This is Afghanistan, okay?
Caught trying to scalp tickets, a street urchin is sent to a Soviet orphanage in this drama set in Afghanistan during the late 1980s. There is nothing especially remarkable about the orphanage; he is not abused or neglected and while he falls in with some bullies, all that the bullies really get up is stealing t-shirts and intimidating younger students. Most of the time he simply he hangs out with…
Andrei Tarkovsky combines the mysteries of deep space with an acute look at grief, loneliness and what it means to be human in this stunning sci-fi drama. While the film moves slowly, it is never dull as Tarkovsky makes his film about tension and uncertainty as opposed to thrills and chills. The film is also very much about the way that we react to the unknown, with a curious parallel to draw between the boy scared of the horse in…
I really hope they do not re-elect that fool, honestly.
Michael Moore's lamentations over the War in Iraq and critique of the George W. Bush administration, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a far more palatable film when revisited after almost twenty years. The film still feels well below Moore par, partly because it starts off as an interesting conspiracy theory documentary only to gradually devolve into a tiresome anti-war project. The most disappointing aspect of the film though remains how generally unfunny…
