Film review – Page 20

We Wuz Robbed and Election Day

November 1, 2004 Doug Cummings Commentary, Film review

I recently reviewed the short film compilation Ten Minutes Older (2002) and fear that I didn’t emphasize Spike Lee’s contribution, We Wuz Robbed, and its timely relevance enough; although it’s a straightforward collection of talking heads, its subject–the illegal purging of thousands of voters (including a large number of black people) from Florida’s 2000 voting rolls–couldn’t be more relevant four years later.

Although I don’t think voting in general is the most powerful political tool in our personal arsenal of resources, it should go without saying that this particular election deserves every American’s participation. If you’re reading this and …

Kuroneko and Jigoku

October 30, 2004 Doug Cummings Film review

While the popularity of Japanese horror films has recently penetrated these shores, the genre has its share of classics, many from the ’50s and ’60s, when Japan’s studio system (like Hollywood’s) was beginning to crumble and smaller studios were experimenting with edgier (and sometimes downright sensationalistic) fare. This weekend, the American Cinematheque has been screening its mini-series, Black Cats and Haunted Castles: Classics of Japanese Horror and the Supernatural, and I’ve managed to see Kaneto Shindo’s atmospheric follow-up to his wonderful 1964 Onibaba (recently released on DVD by Criterion) entitled Black Cat in the Forest (Kuroneko), and …

The Cow

October 21, 2004 Doug Cummings Film review, Uncategorized

My friend Mike Hertenstein has outdone himself and written a wonderful review of Dariush Mahrjui’s landmark Iranian film The Cow (1969) as part of his coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival, and to commemorate the film’s release this week on DVD:

“An awareness of at least two sides to every story is a hallmark for Mehrjui ó even a burden; as a director schooled in the West, Mehrjui has been especially attuned to both sides of the old conflict between city and country, clearly overlaid for him with the contrast between Iran and the West. His career after The

White Nights (of a Dreamer)

October 19, 2004 Doug Cummings Film review, Uncategorized

“It is the hour when practically all business, office hours and duties are at an end, and everyone is hurrying home to dinner, to lie down, to have a rest, and as they walk along they think of other pleasant ways of spending the evening, the night, and the rest of their leisure time. . . . and so at that hour our hero, who has not been wasting his time, either, is walking along with the others. But a strange expression of pleasure plays on his pale and slightly crumpled-looking face. It is not with indifference that he looks

Star Spangled to Death

October 14, 2004 Doug Cummings Film review

Although Stan Brakhage died in 2003, another icon of Beat Generation experimental filmmaking, Ken Jacobs, has just released the latest iteration of his Star Spangled to Death, a fabled project he began in 1957 but didn’t complete, reworked as a performance piece in the ’70s, and decided to go ahead and finalize on digital video for last year’s New York Film Festival with new footage from the 2003 anti-war demonstrations in New York; my screening of it this week at the REDCAT theatre in L.A. included George W. Bush’s comments opposing an International Criminal Court during the presidential debate …

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

October 4, 2004 Doug Cummings Film review

The Small Town (Kasaba)

I try not to get too cynical about the cultural constraints enforced by popular film discussion, but here in Los Angeles, one of the NPR radio stations hosts a high-profile and thoroughly middlebrow program entitled Air Talk, which includes a weekly summary of opening movies called Film Week. The show’s faux-intellectual discourse wouldn’t bother me too much if it didn’t aggressively promote itself as the personification of cultural engagement. (“Join [host] Larry Mantle,” its website says, “weekdays at 10:00 a.m. for lively and in-depth discussion of city news, politics, science, entertainment, the arts …