Nov
09
I’m a lucky guy. I’ve wanted a reason to break out of my cramped, unkempt studio and check out Carsten Höller: Experience, the new exhibit at the New Museum that provides a comprehensive survey of the German-born artist known for his immersive, sensory-confounding — and sometimes adrenaline-pumping — installations, and along comes Air France to …
Oct
05
I won’t hide it: I’m New York City born-and-bred. Concrete was my cradle, and carbon-monoxide-tinged air my mother’s milk (a strained analogy, but apt). Which is to say that I know squat about life on the farm. Don’t know how reap, don’t know how to herd, don’t even think of approaching me about animal husbandry. …
Oct
01
Roland Emmerich can bite me. The guy’s been making disaster films since time can remember, yet for all his besetting humans with floods, fires, and earthquakes (and the occasional alien invasion), he’s never managed to make something as resonant, affecting, and powerful as TAKE SHELTER. A film that skirts the line between vivid fantasy and …
Aug
06
The course of true love is never easy. When an imposing, MAD-MAX-like, fire-breathing automobile intervenes, it can get downright complicated. Evan Glodell’s BELLFLOWER is the tale of two Southern Californians — Woodrow (Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) — who fill their free time with speculations of the post-apocalyptic future and preparations for same that include …
Jun
27
Kids love cars, and kids love CARS — that seems to be the calculation behind Pixar’s latest animated offering, CARS 2. Abandoning the original film’s theme that celebrated the romance of exploring off-the-beaten-superhighway U.S, director John Lasseter and crew have devised an espionage plotline for this sequel, with cocky racecar Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and …
Feb
21
Columbus did not land in Bolivia. But a Spanish film crew has chosen that country to shoot their historic recreation of that event — and how some priests fought against the subsequent enslavement of the natives — because, well, it’s cheaper. That initial bit of convenient exploitation is only the start of the parallels in …
Feb
15
Brad Anderson knows his way around old school horror — you know, the kind that relies on atmosphere and suggestion, the kind values the power of the disturbing thought as much as or more than threateningly wielded power tools and bleeding limb-stumps. In films such as THE MACHINIST (where Christian Bale almost literally wasted away …
Feb
03
It is truly the gift that keeps on giving: The stockpile of nuclear waste that we continue to generate, year in and year out, useless for any practical purpose, but still deadly. In Finland, they think they’ve come up with a solution — it’s called Onkalo (literally Finnish for “hiding place”), a massive, man-made cave …
May
07
Sorta weird how this became the globe-trotter episode. I’d seen BABIES a few weeks ago and was going to go with it as the sole focus of the show, then late last week I stumbled onto BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO and — despite the little voice whispering ever so delicately in the back of my …
Oct
28
“Lars von Trier doesn’t like to fly.” “Lars von Trier isn’t going to talk to a lot of press.” Yeah, yeah; yadda-yadda. But just because he isn’t talking to us doesn’t mean we can’t talk about him, particularly about his childhood. I have it on good authority that he refused to eat his sandwiches until …
