Photo by Brigitte Lacombe
Surely it would be blasphemy to suggest that the strongest suit in Sam Shepard’s fecund, polymath deck is his prose. His plays have won him the Pulitzer (“Buried Child”). His acting has garnered an Oscar nomination (The Right Stuff). His direction on stage and screen is highly respected, or better. But it [...]
Category Archives: Film
Sam Shepard’s “Day Out of Days”
February 4, 2010 – 1:56 pm
Sentences and Images for a Fictional Cinema
August 20, 2009 – 12:28 pm
After finishing Chris Petit’s wonderfully dark 1993 novel Robinson – as wet, grim, and seedy depiction of London as I’ve come across – in which the title character attempts to make “the Citizin Kane of porno movies, I’ve begun to try to think of other works of fiction in which the author attempts to imagine [...]
Sam Bassett’s Seven Nights at the Hotel Chelsea Rooftop
July 20, 2009 – 11:57 am
Not just anyone can shack-up in the Hotel Chelsea. Reserved for the oddest, craziest, most brilliant cream of the creative crop, its rooms have housed everyone from Mark Twain to Jack Kerouac, Willem de Kooning to Marilyn Monroe, Sarah Bernhardt to Sid Vicious. So the fact that legendary manager and curator of residents, Stanley Bard, [...]
Eastern Promise: The Afghan Pop Wars
June 25, 2009 – 7:48 am
“If there was no music, then the world would be silent” is the opening sentence of Afghan Star, uttered by a child blinded by war just after he sings his melody to the camera. Originally commissioned as a standard television documentary, the colorful excesses of this project reel were taken up and transformed into a cinema [...]
“Um… it just all ties together.”
May 28, 2009 – 11:19 am
Luke Myer and Andrew Neel’s New World Order opened at New York’s Cinema Village on Friday. The film follows various so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ and activists as they pass out flyers outside Ground Zero, cover a Bilderberg Group meeting in Istanbul, and prepare for the imminent collapse of American Civilization in Idaho. Without narration, New World [...]
Hope Against Hope: Utopia in Four Movements
May 14, 2009 – 1:25 am
Never has the utopian impulse seemed closer to realization and yet never has its hope been so permanently extinguished than in the past century. It is precisely these events, and a concern for the century without such a hope presently yawning in front of us, that motivates filmmaker Sam Green’s new work in progress, Utopia in Four Movements.
Il Divo Primer
April 28, 2009 – 4:08 am
I just found out that Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo opened in New York on Friday and since it probably won’t be out for long I’m rushing this post. I’m not familiar with Sorrentino’s earlier work and I saw the film too long ago to review it properly. This is intended as more of a primer [...]
