Author: Doug Cummings

I’ll admit that I’m torn by the trailer for the upcoming digitally-enhanced and restored version of George Lucas’ arty, dystopian exercize in style, THX 1138 (1971). On the one hand, the trailer is marvelously structured, and the film itself is such a radically incongruous debut for one of today’s most popular feel-good entertainers that it’s virtually a movie from an alternate universe. If the film had been a critical or financial success, who knows where it might have steered Lucas in subsequent years? As a true anomaly in the filmmaker’s oeuvre, it’s one of those fascinating, forgotten relics of …

Film critic, theorist, and writer Susan Sontag doing what Susan Sontag does best in the latest issue of New York Times Magazine, writing on the photographs from Abu Ghraib and what responses have said about deeper cultural and political truths:

Shock and awe were what our military promised the Iraqis. And shock and the awful are what these photographs announce to the world that the Americans have delivered: a pattern of criminal behavior in open contempt of international humanitarian conventions. Soldiers now pose, thumbs up, before the atrocities they commit, and send off the pictures to their buddies. Secrets

The Internet is often characterized as being an ethereal jumble of opinion and interaction without consensus. And while this can be true–particularly in chat rooms or Usenet free-for-alls–I’ve enjoyed consistent interaction with people across the country and the globe over the past few years whose tastes in film are remarkably similar to my own, and who continue to suggest new films to discover with a genuine degree of certainty regarding shared cinematic values. Whether we all have similar tastes because we’ve spent so much time interacting online or whether we’ve spent so much time interacting online that our tastes have …