In Hirokazu Koreeda’s last film, the Oscar®-nominated SHOPLIFTERS, he incisively examined the ethics of capitalism, and its effects on one poverty-stricken, yet devoted, ragtag family ingeniously doing battle with a system designed to keep them down economically. In THE TRUTH, he moves the action from Tokyo to Paris to examine the ethics of veracity on… Read More »
FILM STARS DON’T DIE IN LIVERPOOL
Click here to listen to the interview. Full disclosure, my sister, when she was 12, was in a film with Gloria Grahame. It was a pretty forgettable horror film, and they had no scenes together, but it made for some nice small talk with Paul McGuigan before we settled down to our conversation about FILM… Read More »
THE GLASS CASTLE — Jeannette Walls Interview
Jeannette Walls is a larger-than-life personality, brimming with energy and a ready laugh that fills a room. That she is still laughing after the childhood she describes in her best-selling memoir, THE GLASS CASTLE is a testament to her innate toughness, and to her ability to appreciate the wonder with which her eccentric parents imbued… Read More »
JARHEAD
The history of the military film has had several notable eras, from the melancholy of THE BIG PARADE (featuring the divine John Gilbert in arguably his best role) from the post WWI, silent era, to the jingoistic excesses during and just after WWII with such offerings as an iconic John Wayne THE FLYING LEATHERNECKS, followed… Read More »
BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!
Guy Maddin’s BRAND UPON THE BRAIN! is such a purely, viscerally visual experience that, like trying to describe a dream, much is lost when trying to put the language of the subconscious into words. And that is what Maddin is working with here. Boasting no spoken dialogue, eccentric black-and-white exposures, he bills this as a… Read More »
Anthony Swofford Remembers What It’s Like to be A JARHEAD
For someone who has seen action in the Persian Gulf, not to mention survived Marine boot camp, Anthony Swofford is a surprisingly soft-spoken guy. When I spoke to him on October 25, 2005 about JARHEAD, the film version of his memoir of the same name about his time in the Marines, including taking part in Gulf War… Read More »