10th & Wolf
Sensitive young men who feel betrayed by their heroic but unfeeling fathers (and mothers) have so been done to death, yet we never seem to tire of them
We Don’t Need Another Superhero
Is the glut of movie superheroes spoiling our appetite for stories of real heroes? — From The Wall Street Journal of August 11, 2006
Casa de Areia (House of Sand)
House of Sand (Casa de Areia), by the Brazilian director Andrucha Waddington from a screenplay by Elena Soárez, is a woman’s picture, set in a masculine — indeed, a heroic — landscape which dwarfs the men and animals making their painful way across it in the opening scenes. What we see are the wild and…
House of Sand (Casa de Areia)
A Brazilian reflection on the vanity of human — or at least of masculine — wishes and the permanence of the eternal feminine
World Trade Center
We should welcome the fact that Oliver Stone’s 9/11 movie is without an explicit left-wing agenda, but the absence of one also makes the film the victim of its own unbridled emotion
Entry from August 8, 2006
“This Bowman fool is obviously another paid mouthpiece for the right,” writes somebody about a recent movie review of mine in another publication. Then he goes on to say, rather self-contradictorily I think, that “it isn”t about left or right. Never has been. That is how the so-called conspiracies continue to mount up, pointing to…
Demoiselle d’Honneur, La (The Bridesmaid)
Claude Chabrol’s The Bridesmaid (La Demoiselle d’Honneur), which came out in 2004 but is only now finding a release in the US, is a classic Chabrol-type study of the point where passion and madness intersect with ordinary life. Passion is represented by Senta (Laura Smet), who has changed her name from Stéphanie to adopt that…
Bridesmaid, The (La Demoiselle d’Honneur)
Another French paean to amour fou and the existential sainthood appertaining to madmen and criminals — so what’s not to like?
Entry from August 2, 2006
Browsing, as I sometimes do, the old obituaries that the New York Times’s website runs next to the new ones during the month of their subjects’ deaths, I come across the following in the obit of Richard Burton (d. August, 1984), written by Maureen Dowd: When he reached the age of 50, after a five-year career…
Quinceañera
The gay fantasy of sex divorced from sin is superimposed on a community of Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles
Entry from July 31, 2006
Why do you suppose it is that the media light up with the universal outrage when Israel accidentally kills civilians in its war on Hezbollah in Lebanon but merely take it for granted when Hezbollah deliberately targets Israeli civilians with Katyusha rockets fired from Lebanese territory? Part of the answer to this question may lie…
