The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is sure to be well analyzed by lots of people who have read the books, which I haven't, so these are really just some quick notes from a radical politics & critical theory junky to read the movie in that world of reference. My way into the universe of The Hunger Games is through vulgar political comparison and ( Read more... )

Catching up on a few movies. I should say that I'm calling these "movie notes" rather than "reviews," because they are essentially something like reading notes, taking note of interesting aspects of a movie I could imagine wanting to write about at some point. (Though inevitably I'll hit some movies I have no intention of ever writing about, and ( Read more... )

I've decided to start keeping short notes on movies I watch, because my memory is getting? has always been? so damn bad. I keep reading notes, of course, too, but those are often of a more motivated / focused sort. And not on a blog. Why would anyone else want to read my movie notes? Why would anyone else want to read this blog in general, except ( Read more... )

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061429/

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On a friend's recommendation, I've been watching a few of Michael Haneke's films lately. I watched the original Funny Games a few months ago; a couple of weeks ago I saw The Piano Teacher. I found Funny Games to be well-done but ultimately not gripping. It seemed like a fine deconstruction of violence in film, but it was disengaging. I wonder if ( Read more... )

I've been meaning to write something of a review of The Dark Knight in this blog for a while.  Over the last two days I have had two occasions to recount my analysis verbally to friends, and they have looked at me as if I'm ... saying something complicated or strange.  I think my analysis is actually kind of cultural-studies-101, so I won't be ( Read more... )

I feel like I've been stuck in a bit of a blogging rut lately - sort of very dense, chewy political stuff and very dense, chewy (though not necessarily emotionally intense) metablogging.  So I thought I'd try to do a little more low-key journaling on here for a while.  I hope this doesn't disappoint those of you who are really into dense and chewy ( Read more... )

Okay, this started out as a reply to Maeve66's post, but got way too long.

I saw Narnia.... One thing that was striking to me about making this particular movie now and how it was made was that it could easily be a Christianity of the crusades that is on center stage--in addition to the gender stuff, which was striking, modern Hollywood doesn't make ( Read more... )