Month: June 2005

Response to a Meme

Commentary

Darren Hughes has issued a blog meme, so here is my response:

1. Total number of films I own on DVD and video.

I’d estimate around 250, which I consider somewhat spartan compared to a lot of DVD aficionados I know. (By contrast, I own less than a dozen VHS tapes.) Most of these titles are imports or films I wouldn’t otherwise easily rent, although I realize online DVD providers are making such a criterion obsolete these days. Fortunately I have the luxury of living in a city with several independent, well-stocked video stores, and pretty much only purchase …

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Lewton and Ulmer

Uncategorized


I Walked with a Zombie

Great DVD news has arrived this week for fans of elegant horror: Universal have announced a Bela Lugosi collection for September that will finally offer Edgar G. Ulmer’s expressionist/art deco masterpiece, The Black Cat (1934), and Warner have solidified an October street date for their long-awaited Val Lewton collection. The Lewton set will contain five discs and nine films, including the three classics Jacques Tourneur directed (1942’s Cat People and 1943’s I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man) as well as Mark Robson’s masterpiece, The Seventh Victim (1943), which critic Jonathan Rosenbaum …

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Au hasard Balthazar

DVD review

The Criterion Collection has released Bresson’s masterpiece, Au hasard Balthazar on DVD today; this review is for robert-bresson.com, which will publish our full review of the DVD shortly. –Doug

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The scholar C.H. Dodd once defined a parable as a “a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application as to tease it into active thought.” Parables are thus distinguished from fables (which involve fantasy or myth) or allegories (which are highly symbolic with emblematic …

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Howl’s Moving Castle

Film review

Last night, I attended the Los Angeles debut of the subtitled Howl’s Moving Castle, which is screening along with the dubbed version exclusively at Disney’s movie palace, the El Capitan, in Hollywood. The theater was built in the ’20s with an East Indian design and sits across the street from the Grauman’s Chinese Theater but has much less the quantity and quality of seating; general admission, I discovered, is relegated to the far edges of the theater.

Not that it mattered, Hayao Miyazaki’s film would probably prove to be a delight seen from any angle. Its combination of elaborate …

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L’Argent

DVD review

New Yorker Video have recently released Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (1983) on DVD, and this review of the film will predicate our complete review of the DVD at www.robert-bresson.com shortly. –Doug

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For many, Robert Bresson’s final work, L’Argent (1983), is a perfect formal and thematic culmination of the filmmaker’s sporadic, but consistently provocative career. But its reception has always been mixed; at its Cannes Film Festival premiere, Bresson received a new prize (presented by Orson Welles)–the Grand Prix de CrÈation–which he shared with Andrei Tarkovsky (for Nostalghia), and members of the audience booed the 82-year …

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Funny Ha Ha

Film review

Alfred Hitchcock may have preferred “slices of cake” to “slices of life,” but the cinema has excelled at both ever since its inception. If the latter is more rare in American film production, it has appeared from the works of Robert J. Flaherty to Little Fugitive (1953), a film remembered this year for the death of Morris Engel last May and for its impact on independent cinema, John Cassavetes, and the French New Wave. More than painting, music, or literature, film has an astonishing ability to record ordinary people in ordinary settings with an aural and visual clarity that can …

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