Monthly Archives: January 2011

Today’s entry from Filmology is F for Fake (1973), Orson Welles’s fascinating bit of cinematic flim-flammery which finds a few solid and unadorned truths amidst a universe full of fakery.

My book, Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to a Complete Film Education, is now for sale in both paperback and ebook formats.

Today’s entry from Filmology is Battleground, William Wellman’s moving, rough-edged, and sarcastic film about a platoon mired in the bloody snow during the Battle of the Bulge. It’s a stirring corrective for anybody who thinks that all films of that era were uniformly flag-waving patriotic propaganda.

My book, Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to a Complete Film Education, is now for sale in both paperback and ebook formats.

PopMatters is running their picks today for the best nonfiction books of 2010. I contributed a few items to the overall list of greatness (Destroy All Movies!!!, Death of the Liberal Class, among others) and also wrote the intro.

The link is here, fruitful reading.

When Ulrik (Stellan Skarsgard) is released from prison at the start of Hans Petter Moland’s wry crime comedy, he looks like something ragged and frozen, a man who’s been left under an emotional tundra from which he never expected to be thawed out. Moland’s film is much the same, shot in a dark and slushy corner of Norway which appears to be mostly industrial wasteland that hasn’t seen the sun or an honest smile in living memory. Just about the only hint of life in the film is the score, which bubbles along with a circus-like humor underneath the surface of this initially very dour, quiet, and uneventful film, reminding us that, yes, indeed, this is a comedy…

A Somewhat Gentle Man is playing now in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

Today’s entry from Filmology is Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock’s creepy-fantastic 1951 adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel about doubling, repressed passions, and the occasional murder.

My book, Filmology: A Movie-a-Day Guide to a Complete Film Education, is now for sale in both paperback and ebook formats.

For Chris Hedges’ new warning about how we’re all going to Hell, Death of the Liberal Class, something is different. The usual problems are there, his reflexive sneering and overindulgence of the need to name-check, not to mention a buckshot approach to the issues at hand which brings down some innocent bystanders along the way. However, this time, the primary thrust of his critique is not only dead-on, it’s something close to terrifying…

It’s not clear in Mamoru Hosada’s candy-colored YA trip of an anime which of these dilemmas is more disturbing for its nervous, math-nerd hero: the most beautiful girl in school suddenly appears to have noticed that he exists, and a rampant artificial intelligence might just be bringing civilization to an end. While the latter certainly has greater implications for the world as a whole, Mamoru (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) keeps the film’s hothouse teen anxieties so front and center that ultimately the hero’s romantic issues actually seem more important…

Summer Wars is playing now in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

Now that the first decade of the new millennium is done with, despite what the snarking class might say, the state of film is very healthy indeed — even considering atrocities like Sex and the City 2…

Today’s entry from Filmology is 1999′s Hitchcockian adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s criminal-psychological investigation The Talented Mr. Ripley.