|Ben Jarman| Up until his death, Stan Lee showed up in a cameo role for every movie that’s part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Even general audiences loved finding him pop up as a postman or security guard. Appearances like this quickly made Stan Lee a household… Continue reading
|Alex Kies| Lots of interesting things happen at weddings and funerals. It’s a shame to miss any of it. – Ritsuko Although he is a key figure of Japanese New Wave, and his final films were consciously West-facing, Ōshima Nagisa never quite took off in the West like his friend Kurosawa Akira… Continue reading
|Terry Serres| The 1969 film Boy (Shonen) by Nagisa Ōshima is something of a minor masterpiece, a work that is undeniably moving but still hard to crack, as inscrutable as its young protagonist’s impassive gaze. The boy in question is Toshio Omura, played by Tetsuo Abe… Continue reading
|John Costello| Two-thirds of the way through Casablanca (1942), the action pauses in Rick’s Café Américain to dwell on three minor characters seated at one of the tables. Instead of another scene involving a pickpocket or a musical number advancing the story, the camera lingers on an elderly couple, the Leuchtags. Carl, a waiter… Continue reading
|MH Rowe| Things are not quite as you remember in Casablanca. Consider before anything else the film’s hellish yet also somewhat corny setting. Here we have the city of Casablanca on the coast of Morrocco only days before Pearl Harbor, December 1941. None of the film’s characters know the fateful Japanese Continue reading
|Chris Polley| When I found out that no one had claimed to write something for the Trylon’s upcoming screening of 1984 Canuxploitation dance-ercise flick Heavenly Bodies, I felt like Charlie getting the golden ticket to the chocolate factory. What did I do to deserve this? I’d thank… Continue reading
|Chris Ryba-Tures| As I grimly plod into my forties, movie nostalgia has…not so much become a heady escapist drug, so much as an increasingly out-of-body point of fascination. Obviously, because childhood is generally just so easy to wax nostalgic about, but moreover because the… Continue reading
|Bob Aulert| Up in the air, Junior Birdman The Rocketeer (1991) blends nostalgia, adventure, romance, and patriotism into a classic superhero narrative. Set in the golden age of aviation during the late 1930s, it’s an adaptation of Dave Stevens’s comic book series of the same name… Continue reading
|Malcolm Cooke| Werner Herzog has one thing to say to the proponents of Cinéma Vérité: “‘Happy New Year, losers.’”1 Herzog has always had beef with the idea of documentary as from the perspective of a fly on the wall, a genre of detached and objective reporting of facts. “That… Continue reading
|Dan McCabe| In 1999, acclaimed German filmmaker Werner Herzog came to the Walker Art Center for an on-stage interview with the late film critic Roger Ebert. During the interview, Herzog made his “Minnesota Declaration”—a twelve-point denunciation of Cinema Verité, a style of documentary… Continue reading
