Author Archive
SIFF Film Review – Dead Pigs
Dead Pigs presents a panorama of modern lives in go-go-go Shanghai, like La Dolce Vita (1960) and The Great Beauty (2013) did in Rome or Nashville (1975) did in…well, Nashville. Much like how Magnolia (1998) brought down a rain of frogs to unite its disparate characters,…
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Film Review – The Lost City of Z
Percy Fawcett went looking for a lost city in the unmapped jungles of the Amazon – several times – and never returned. Fawcett’s story holds inherent interest – it’s estimated around a hundred subsequent adventurers died looking for him – and it could be told…
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SXSW Film Review – Spettacolo
Every year, the medieval-built town of Montichiello, Tuscany puts on a show: an “auto-drama” in which many of the town’s 120-some residents act as themselves, in a play they wrote, about their own lives. The documentary Spettacolo chronicles a year in the life of the…
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SIFF Film Review – Alone
As the title of the Korean psychodrama Alone suggests, its protagonist is one isolated man – emotionally distant, physically by himself, and probably insane.
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SIFF Film Review – Vanity
If you’re going to die – and who isn’t? – Switzerland sounds like a pretty good final stop. In addition to the alpine landscape, chocolate and high standard of living (*that you’d be leaving behind), the famously neutral nation has one of the world’s most…
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SIFF Film Review – Dawn
If life is often absurd, life in the Eastern Bloc must have had exceptionally absurd particularities. These details are warped even further in Dawn (original language title: Ausma), a hilariously grotesque parade of everyday life in a Latvian farming collective: through denunciations and bowl haircuts;…
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Film Review – High-Rise
Our comfortable little lives are built on waste, corpses, and ecosystem-destroying carbon emissions. Those words are as easy for you to read on your slave-built mobile phone as it is to write from my own slave-built machine, the horror amplified all the more by the…
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Film Analysis – Spectre of a Legacy
[SPOILERS, of course] Spectre opens with an epigram that “the dead are with us.” Few things ought to be more terrifying to James Bond. His license to kill has racked up a quite a body count (362, by at least two counts) about which 007…
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