February 2011
13 posts
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Stanley Kubrick Week: Spartacus (1960)
STANLEY AND KIRK’S EPIC BATTLE
by Andrew Root
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 gladiator epic Spartacus, a little person dances a jig with a dog. Didn’t know that, did you? This inter-species merry-making is no bizarro mind-bending motif either (as Kubrick would revisit twenty years later in The Shining – you know the scene I’m talking about); there are no sinister undertones, no...
January 2011
10 posts
4 tags
Stanley Kubrick Week: The Killing (1956)
RESERVOIR HORSES
by Katherine Spada
The first film studies course I took in college, which inspired me to declare it as my major, was an in-depth study of the works of Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, and John Cassavetes. I mostly chose film studies as my major because I wanted a free pass to win any argument about movies with anyone who couldn’t start in with, “Well, as a film...
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Prodigal Sons (2008)
THE TIES THAT BIND
by Elisabeth Geier
The set-up is fast and familiar: over grainy, Super 8 footage of kids riding bicycles around a schoolyard, a narrator explains the make-up of her family, the McKerrows. Dad, a doctor, is dead. Mom, a schoolteacher, is soldiering on. There is an adopted older brother, Marc. There is our narrator, conceived shortly after Marc’s arrival....
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Somewhere (2010)
A Movie About No-One.
by Letitia Trent
I love Sofia Coppola’s gauzy and softly pretty aesthetic. The Virgin Suicides, still my favorite of her films, has the hazy, vaguely doomed feel of being a teenager at any time, in any place, which makes the actual doom in the movie seem that much more shocking—things are only supposed to seem like hell when you are a teenager. Likewise, Lost in...
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Tron: Legacy (2010)
Daft Punk, Tron: Legacy, Religiosity
by Evan Bryson
1. Music Thomas and I were very nervous on the drive down to Bloomington, IN. We were meeting up with our friend Lauren at one of the hipper university bars, and idling down I-65 we contemplated the boring crush of the scene, its loudness and loneliness. In that sweaty mob, we would have to embrace a cohort of vegan gunslingers with turquoise...
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The King's Speech (2010)
HE SEEMS TO BE SAYING IT RATHER WELL
by Elizabeth Wilcox
Logue: What was your earliest memory?
King George VI: I’m not … here to discuss … personal matters.
Logue: Why are you here then?
King George VI: Because I bloody well stammer!
First, let me just say that I’m not really a Colin Firth girl. I’ve never seen him as Darcy (in either Pride & Prejudice or Bridget Jones’s...
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A Year in Review
SOME MOVIES I SAW IN 2010
by Chris Cantoni Movies you didn’t like, or didn’t see, that I liked:
The Switch Yes, Jennifer Aniston in a romantic comedy has become not unlike a brightly colored insect in the animal world: stay away. Luckily Jason Bateman is also in The Switch, and does a pretty good uptight straight-laced guy who ends up being a great-laced guy! (See what I did...
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Black Swan (2010)
I JUST WANT TO BE PERFECT.
by Edward Montgomery
Being one of the lucky ones able to see Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, I have a unique memory of the director introducing the film to a restless audience and ending his remarks with, “Judging from the reaction at Venice, I’m sorry—we didn’t know we were doing it at the time.” An hour and a half later, the...