Wild Sound

Spiegel: Why have you, as a chronolist of Manhattan, not included September 11th in your films?

Allen: I don’t find politics profound enough to deal with it as an artist. The story of human beings is composed of murder, only the cosmetics and the decorations change: 2001 some fanatics killed Americans, and now the Americans kill Iraqis. And when I was a kid, Nazis murdered Jews. Now, Jews and Palestinians are butchering each other. Politics has been volatile for thousands of years, and meaningless, because everything repeats itself. But, as a citizen I vote, or course.

Filed by cynthia rockwell at 1:16 pm under Uncategorized
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Here is a very cool animation that was in Resfest and also Guy linked to it a long time ago.

Filed by cynthia rockwell at 2:28 pm under Uncategorized
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Opening night of Resfest was good, though not spectacular. I confess to both disappointment and relief–having worked with the Boston Underground Film Festival, I am attending partly to see if they found better films than we did. And I’m happy to say that the best film in the lineup was a film we showed in Underground–Peter Cornwell’s Ward 13 (pictured). It’s hilarious and was definitely the audience fave, but I voted for a different film, Jo-Jo in the Stars. I’d seen Ward 13 so many times already and figured everyone else was voting for it so one vote against won’t hurt.

Guy says the “By Design” program today will be better, so I’ll let you know…

Filed by cynthia rockwell at 6:39 am under Uncategorized
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I think the only way to enjoy Bertolucci’s The Dreamers is to know nothing about film history. Or more specifically, to not have a master’s degree in film studies, to not have read 687 undergraduate papers about Keaton vs. Chaplin, or another 582 about the French New Wave, or to have written about 12 of your own on radical film of the 1960s and the Failure of the American Left.

That way, it wouldn’t sound like a bunch of history books talking when you watched the film and heard the oversimplified theses of 100 different papers spouted from the characters’ mouths–pretty mouths, but mouths which are not good enough at acting to pull off those whoppers naturally.

When the three are about to die in their own safe-from-the-real-world little hut and a brick from the student riots in the street crashes through their window and breaks their collective dream and oh-so-symbolically brings the real world crashing into their lives, I had to chuckle and try to tick off the number of papers I had written with this theme, and the number of films from the 1960s that have this as their theme–Mysteries of an Organism being the first to come to mind. But in The Dreamers it feels so self-conscious and dumbed-down that I laughed and/or rolled my eyes through much of it.

Though it did have a fantastic opening credit sequence.

Filed by cynthia rockwell at 10:27 am under Uncategorized
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“My dream is not to care about anything ever again. That’s my fantasy: not to love anyone, or care about anything, or want to change the world in any way. At the end of an extremely vigorous workload, I can’t wait to retire or to die or to not care anymore.”

in Greencine

Filed by cynthia rockwell at 2:06 pm under Uncategorized
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I lied, I don’t really have anything else to add to my previous post about Collateral. It’s good. That’s all.

I spent the holiday weekend doing mad cleaning. It’s amazing how much more pride you take in the appearance of your home once you no longer hate the people you are living with. This place is spotless.

I found bottlecaps in all the most unreachable areas. I found a beer can in the back of a bathroom shelf. I found a cache of flattened cardboard beer cases in a storage closet.

But they also left an air conditioner, a gas grill, a toaster oven, a George Forman grill, and two weedwackers. Oh, and a penis-carved coffee table.

Filed by cynthia rockwell at 8:14 pm under Apes
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They left behind the precious woodcarving. For sale to the highest bidder. Or to whoever wants to take a sledgehammer to it in my back yard. Your choice.

Filed by cynthia rockwell at 12:29 pm under Apes
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