What is real? Is it the physical world around us that, as Lily Tomlin once put it, is really nothing more than a collective hunch, or is it the emotional world we construct for ourselves from memory, and pain, and hope? Andrew Haigh’s enigmatic meditation of a film, ALL OF US STRANGERS considers just that… Read More »
REMINISCENCE
There is a persistent torpor to REMINISCENCE, a film that tries to be many things and fails for the most part. Rife with visuals that evoke a disquieting dreamlike state, the story, an ersatz neo-noir set mostly between sunset and sunrise, drones along with the cinematic equivalent of a mosquito’s interminable buzz on a humid… 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 »
Laurie Anderson Shares the HEART OF A DOG
Where oh where to start when talking to Laurie Anderson? A performance artist, musician, actress, filmmaker, first NASA artist-in-residence, and all around great soul, she was in San Francisco to talk about her new film, HEART OF A DOG, a film that uses her dog Lola Belle’s life and death as a touchstone for a… 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 »