A man walks out of the Mojave Desert to reclaim a relationship with his son, Hunter, and the wife he abandoned.The fact that his son has been brought up by his childless brother and his wife only adds to the emotional drama. Such is the basic outline of Wim Wenders ‘Paris, Texas.’ This is my …
Category Archives: Film
The Last Sitting
Will we have alive in a time when Marilyn Monroe is totally forgotten? I’d venture to say that no other film actress from any period has the enduring power of Monroe. And it’s almost entirely, in my opinion, based on image, which perhaps explains the reissue of the Bert Stern photography book, which features the …
NORTHMAN
I’ve seen Robert Eggers’s The Northman three times now. An everyday tale of marauding Vikings, it features Alexander Saarsgard as Amleth, a man hell-bent on revenge after his father is slain by his brother. Clearly, forgiveness was not a big thing in Viking society because Amleth goes through the world slaughtering anything that comes across …
Making Monty Clift
In the 1950s, three young actors were considered part of a new breed challenging the orthodox masculine stereotypes portrayed by the likes of John Wayne.James Dean and Marlon Brando are known to many, but the third, Montgomery Clift, considered by many to be the best of the three, is starting to fade into history. Luckily, …
Misfits
Film Forum has been showing a season of films featuring Montgomery Clift, one of which is The Misfits. Filmed at the very beginning of the sixties and released in 1961, the title refers to two things. First, the wild mustang horses that once roamed the Nevada landscape, and secondly, the principal characters, who cannot fit …
Somebody’s Watching You
The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola has been showing at Film Forum recently and though I’ve seen it a couple of times I decided to revisit the seventies classic. It didn’t disappoint. Harry Caul is a surveillance expert, one of the best in the business, and is asked to follow a young couple meeting in …
Parallel Mothers
No matter how hard you try to silence it, human history never shuts up – Eduardo Galeano This is the quote that ends Pedro Almodovar’s latest film ‘Parallel Mothers’ and it fits a film whose principal theme is the recovery of truth. The plot is simple . Two mothers a pregnant at the same time …
Drive My Car
Drive My Car is a 3-hour film, based on Haruki Murakami short story. Needless to say, that story has been blown in all directions and made infinitely more complex. An actor/author, Yusuke Kafuku, is married to a screenwriter, Oto, who he discovers making love to a young man acting in one of her scripts. He …
Mass
The subject of mass shootings like Columbine has been the subject of a few films like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. Mass is another attempt to look at such tragedies but this time from the point of view of the parents. Two couples meet in a local church in order to heal the terrible psychological wounds …
Paranoia Trilogy
The Sixties and early seventies were a great time for conspiracy theories from the Kennedy Assassination to Watergate. A short after the later Alan J Pakula produced what is now known as the Paranoia Trilogy consisting of the films Klute, The Parallax View and All the Presidents Men. Then conspiracies were all on the left …
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