Restoring the order of things

As Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 1999 feature Charisma begins, burnt out cop Yabuike (Koji Yaukusho) is brought in to defuse a hostage situation. Seized by a moment of indecision, he misses a key opportunity, leading to the deaths of both the unbalanced criminal and his prisoner. Yabuike is forced to take an obviously much-needed vacation, but instead of going home, he decides to go for a walk in the woods....

Nip/Tuck: Franju's Eyes Without a Face

To the strains of Maurice Jarre's spiraling carnival-waltz score, Alida Valli drives through the French countryside just outside of Paris. In the back seat is a figure slumped over, face obscured by a hat. Valli pulls over to the side of the road and drags the body out of the car. Dressed in a man's raincoat and nothing else, the corpse's legs become just a little too visible for comfort as Valli, her own black vinyl raincoat glistening in the moonlight, rolls the dead girl into the Seine....

We all fall down

When funding fell through for Lars Von Trier’s sophomore feature film, instead of completely scrapping the project, he transformed it into something new. The least seen of his major works, Epidemic (1987) is a very self-referential piece for the director, a film about the making of itself, real life eventually contaminated by fiction....

I've got something I want to play for you...

Television programmer Max Renn (James Woods) is looking for something new, "something tough" to really pull in an audience that, as he sees it, has grown tired of the same old same old. Softcore Japanese porn isn't going to do it; faux-Greco-Roman period softcore really isn't going to do it. One day, Max thinks he has found his solution in a pirate televison signal his technogeek Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) picks up in his lab....

Dispatch from Southwestern Florida

Dear Tobias, I trust you're doing well. I wanted to write a note to tell you how excited I am about my recent trip to Florida. I got a sexy purple sunburn on the Southwest Florida's many beaches. I ate from the delicious chain restaurants dotting the lush tropical landscape. I watched an overalls-clad female screech in horror at the condition of a port-a-potty. I enthusiastically scratched mosquito bites I received while airboating through the Everglades. However, here's the most exciting part. I know you study reptiles and amphibians, so I trust you'll be pleased to note that I have...

Dad's First Rock Concert

10:30 p.m., interior of smallish Manhattan living room. H.J. sits in an overstuffed, claw-shredded but comfortable chair, reading from The Secret Lives of Presidents, a dishy expose of Presidential tics and peccadillos. Jen sits on the couch, reading (and intermittently giggling at) Thank You, Jeeves. The phone rings. Jen hops up to answer it. Jen: Hello? (An older man's voice, shouting over intense yet indeterminate background noise.) Voice: Jennifer! Jen: Dad? (Loud music, but not much else, is audible.)...

Lights...camera...action! : Godard's A Woman is a Woman

Angela (Anna Karina) has decided she wants to have a baby. Lover Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) will have none of it. Their current situation is fine as is. He doesn't seem to care when Angela decides to seek outside help from Emile's pal Alfred Lubitsch (Jean-Paul Belmondo). "Is this a comedy or a tragedy?" This being a Jean-Luc Godard film it's, well....Godard....

Some People Like Kieslowski, Others Jet Fighters

The Final Countdown is now on DVD!

Pale Flower

--> Yakuza Muraki (Ryo Ikebe) finds himself in an existentialist funk in Masahiro Shinoda's Pale Flower (1964). Fresh from serving a three year prison sentence for a gangland murder, he feels no connection with the people he sees on the Tokyo streets. He could kill any one and it would not make a difference. The mob he belongs to has joined up with its former rival, all the better to prevent a new faction from Osaka from moving in on their territory. Things have changed in the relatively short amount of time he was away, but Muraki can still...

1040EZ-Wider

It’s 11:00 pm on April 15th and I haven’t mailed off my tax return. I’m not that much of slacker. Really. How did it come to this? First off, let me dispel a little myth about USPS. They don’t all stay open until midnight on April 15th. In the city of San Francisco, population 700,000+, just one post office remains open beyond normal business hours. Too bad I’m not in San Francisco. I’m in The People’s Republic of Berkeley, wandering the streets in the manner of a lazy fly, following around a guy who says he knows where to find...

Onibaba

In war-torn 16th century Japan, a middle aged woman and her young daughter-in-law (both unnamed) struggle for existence. Killing samurai who lose thier way in the tall susuki grass, the two women trade the armor and weapons for food and other supplies, dumping the corpses in a deep, dark hole nearby....

Madeleine L'Engle in The New Yorker

This week's New Yorker features a profile (not available online) of author Madeleine L'Engle. In the profile, the author Cynthia Zarin writes: "When I was in college, I remember a friend saying to me, 'There are really two kinds of girls. Those who read Madeleine L'Engle when they were small, and those who didn't.'" I was the kind of girl who read Madeleine L'Engle. Although I wasn't crazy about the Austin series, I read all of the Murray series -- A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet (perhaps an odd choice as my childhood...

Le Corbeau

1942, a small French village. The townspeople begin receiving poison pen letters signed "Le Corbeau" ("the Raven"). The letters shed unwanted light on the locals' secrets, from the underground abortion work of Dr. Remy Germain (Pierre Fresnay), to extramarital affairs, to the corruptness of the mayor. While the first letter seems to be written only to intimidate a potentially unfaithful wife, soon the entire town is in a paranoid uproar over the raven's apparent intention to expose all of the dirty little secrets possible. Henri_Georges Clouzot's Le Corbeau was made during the German occupation of France under the aegis...

A Short Film About Love review

Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film About Love opens with a close up of hands, wrists bandaged. Another hand attempts to caress them but they in turn are stopped by a third party. The scene's significance will become apparent later. The film proper begins: we witness 19-year-old Tomek (Olaf Lubaszenko) break into what appears to be a school and steal a small telescope. He sets the small scope up in the bedroom he rents from a friend's mother and spies on Magda (Grazyna Szapolowska), an artist living in an apartment on the opposite side of the courtyard. Tomek is clearly obsessed...

Eating Samosas At The Epicenter

Going out to eat and drink in New York City, especially if you're a bit of food reviews junkie like myself, there is always this lingering feeling that there's someplace hotter and hipper than where you are. But as I stood in the upstairs bar area at Spice Market in the Meatpacking District last Saturday night, after Amanda Hesser published a rave review in Wednesday's New York Times, I realized I was at the epicenter of the buzz. And a word to the wise, at the epicenter of the buzz, everyone is staring at everyone else trying to determine if...

City Mouse Explains Friendster to Country Mice

A Short Film About Killing Review

19-year-old Jacek (Miroslaw Baka) wanders aimlessly about Warsaw. He cares nothing about those around him, pushing a man down in a public restroom, dropping a rock off an overpass into traffic. Having coffee in a cafe, he works on cutting a piece of rope down to a suitable length for use as a garrote. A middle aged taxi driver (Jan Tesarz) cleans his cab outside his apartment building. He ogles a young woman working a produce truck and denies a fare to a married couple looking for a ride. He honks his car horn to frighten two passing dogs...

Kerry on Crack

In August of 1996, presidential hopeful John Kerry wasn’t making national headlines. He was, however, busy spearheading a damning investigation into one of our government’s dirtiest secrets....

demonlover Review

Walking a fine line between narratively abstract art movie and genre filmmaking, Olivier Assayas's demonlover occasionally wanders a bit too far in one direction at the sake of the other. Sheer directorial verve keeps the project from falling apart; the movie may be a bit messy at times, but so are the the themes and ideas it explores. Paris-based media conglomerate Volf Group is in the process of buying out Tokyo Anime, a company already producing successful animated porn and looking to expand in to a 3-D video game style variation that will revolutionize the industry. Two competing companies are...

Looking at Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton is a conceptual artist masquerading as a painter. She is most famous for painting images of Kurt Cobain and Leonardo DiCaprio and other pop icons. Peter Schejdahl, reviewing the current show at the Whitney for the New Yorker, describes Peyton as "the moral center of the Biennial." Peyton's work is charming and very likeable. Its small scale (her paintings are usually less than 20 inches tall or wide) and recognizable subject matter make the work inviting. She has certain skills as a colorist and decorative designer in the tradition of Matisse and David Hockney, with whom she shares...

Morvern Callar DVD Review

Movern Callar (Samantha Morton) awakens Christmas morning to find her writer boyfriend dead in a pool of blood, lying in the doorway from the living room to the kitchen. He has committed suicide because, as his note to Morvern on his computer indicates, "it just felt like the right thing to do." Morvern doesn't call the police, she doesn't freak out (at least not in a traditional sense). She opens her presents: a leather jacket, a cigarette lighter, and a mix tape that will provide much of the accompanying soundtrack for the rest of the film. Then she goes...

Wisconsin Death Trip DVD review

Based on Michael Lesy's 1973 book of the same name, James Marsh's Wisconsin Death Trip feeds off of that innate curiosity many of us have with odd facts, people, and crimes. Both book and film are concerned with the town of Black River Falls and the strange events that occurred there in the late 1890s. Lesy collected vintage newspaper clippings and photographs to compose a portait of this turn of the century town. Marsh in turn took select items from the book and recreated them for his film to make, in his words, a visual essay. Opening with beautiful,...

10 Great Things

Manhattan User's Guide asked some of their favorite NYC bloggers to describe their ten favorite things about the city. My server's been having problems, so I think my questionnaire got lost somewhere along the way. Without further ado, then, my 10 Favorite Things about NYC. 1. Faces How many faces does the average New Yorker see each day? My non-scientific estimate is about 1,247. In the street, I've seen ruddy CEOs leaving their sleek black cars and blinged-out hip-hoppers smiling through the windows of their stretch Hummers. On the subway, I once saw a sickly strung-out heroin addict's drool falling...