By Nightdreamer
Oh my G! Where G stands for Grindhouse. I was lucky enough to belong to one of the few people who had the chance to watch an advance screening of Grindhouse. The movie theater was packed and I think people would have happily killed for the small magic blue ticket.
Tarantino is back for good, along with his old friend and usual collaborator Robert Rodriguez. They‘re both back to back with a double-dose packed to the gills with guns, guts and gore. Robert Rodriguez -- the creator of Sin City, From Dusk till Dawn and one of the Four Rooms -- directs a thrilling film, Planet Terror, which works as a dedication to the old zombie-movies school, while Quentin Tarantino (QT) has created a bloodthirsty murderer whose weapon has four wheels and is Death Proof.
By Nightdreamer
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Marie Antoinette, as a Sofia Coppola creation, dresses in flashy corsets, carries a mixture of naiveté and cunning, and just wanders around in a dollhouse called Versailles -- all on a punk sound stage. She is the Innocence personified, being lost in, uh, confusion and condemned in an eternal adolescence. Being the object of a nuptial trade since her early 14’s, she shares the same bed with an equally oblivious Louis XVI.
What’s the only outlet? Irrepressible shopping therapy and extramarital fooling around, according to the fitful scenario of young Ms. Coppola, which appears to claim that “all bored and disappointed wives of all eras are the same." Even if one bypasses this sociological generalization, could the above form the groundwork for a movie of great duration and even greater expectations?
By Nightdreamer
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How on earth could Nikola Tesla be combined with David Bowie? Are they both physicists? Do they both suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder? I know I can’t talk about Tesla in the present tense, but I prefer it from talking about Bowie in the past tense.
But everything just feels so right when the latter is impersonating the former in Christopher Nolan’s latest movie, The Prestige. The success of this movie is definitely not the result of luck. Nolan, a "magician" himself, appears to have estimated in advance, with mathematical precision, all the "ingredients" that would make the hungry-for-quality and satiated-from-quantity moviegoers blink their eyes with surprise -- and he spares neither baroque script, sedulous montage, nor the gathering of acting (or eye-candy-cream) from the foot of Hollywood (because being Nolan means both a preservation of the status quo and an amplification of the alternative style).
Thai Technicolor Dreaming
By Nightdreamer
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Is it just a splatter movie? No, it’s more than that.
Is it just a Thai spaghetti-western style movie? No, it’s more than that.
Is it a heartbreaking love story in all its magnitude? No, it’s more than that.
Is it a very clever directed parody of older Thai melodramatic films? Don't you get it? I said no -- it’s more than that.
Then what is it about? It’s about tears. And when these tears come from a "black tiger," they are very valuable for us as spectators.
Editors' note: We're happy to introduce the newest regular City Belt column today, "Motus Imago," which will focus on independent film. Or, as a cranky detractor put it, "movies with subtitles you have to hire a babysitter and go to New York to see." Anyway, enjoy.
MoMA remembers a great cinematographer
By Nightdreamer
The cinematographer is the person whose profession is motion-picture photography; the person who is responsible for all operations concerning camera work and lighting during the production of a film. If there was a site similar to God Among Directors for cinematographers, Sven Vilhelm Nykvist would feel very lonely on the peak.
