So here's this week's Film Club pick, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Netflix summarizes it thusly:

"In 1995, author and Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a stroke that put him in a coma; he awakened mute and completely paralyzed. Mathieu Amalric stars in this adaptation of Bauby's autobiography, which he dictated by blinking ( Read more... )

This video sums up exactly why I won't be going to see the Watchmen movie... a shame that the person who finally said it was... Hitler? [Contains spoilers.]

Click to view

For now, at least, I'll have to stick with my fond memories of the 1980s Saturday morning adaptation.

So in my spare time lately (I'm underemployed at the moment) I've been tinkering a lot with my Film Viewing database.

Basically what this means is "doing data entry"—entering and rating more and more films. It's fairly tedious work but somehow it's also engaging and engrossing. And the database as a whole is starting to get "robust"—it's starting ( Read more... )

For the last few weeks, Film Club has been interested in movies that present strategies—some successful, some not—for weathering the forces of cultural oppression.

At a certain point, when a film has amassed a sufficiently complicated set of interrelated strategies, I think we can officially say that it is actually depicting a scheme. We have ( Read more... )

Last week, Film Club looked at They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which presents a world so exploitative that the only meaningful gesture of resistance is to refuse existence itself by engaging in violent self-destruction. Choosing death by a bullet certainly holds no shortage of dramatic force, but we here at Film Club wondered whether the movies ( Read more... )

Last week, when writing about Bonnie and Clyde, I spoke on how the film makes a life of crime look exciting and glamorous. Even though we know that the film probably won't end well for the central couple, and even though this knowledge generates a few moments of real pathos, the overall tenor of the film is largely playful: the film invites us to ( Read more... )

When Film Club wrapped up last week's pick, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), I said that it picqued my interest in two different things: 1) how a filmmaker might control the level of sympathy an audience might feel towards a criminal couple, and 2) how a filmmaker might approach the long-term success or failure of a romantic relationship born ( Read more... )

The Postman Always Rings Twice is a novel that's been made into a movie not once, not twice, but four times. Clearly there's something in the story that continues to captivate the minds of audiences... or, at the very least, the minds of filmmakers. The makers of the 1981 version (which we watched this week for Film Club), however, seem unable to ( Read more... )

So last week, after a brief holiday hiatus, Skunkcabbage and I returned to the business of Film Club. The last film we looked at, The Maltese Falcon, featured Humphrey Bogart playing private detective Sam Spade, and we decided to carry on in that vein this week, taking a look at Bogart playing private detective Philip Marlowe in Howard Hawks' The ( Read more... )

[Note: the following post contains some discussion of the resolution and closing scenes of the film.]

So last week, when Film Club looked at It Happened One Night, I presented a pair of screenshots and did a quick little analysis of the power dynamic reflected between the man and the woman depicted therein. This week, we watched The Maltese Falcon ( Read more... )