Author Archive

Roy Andersson raised so much talk with his previous film Songs from the Second Floor that everybody was anxious to get a ticket for his new feature.

This is harsh cinema, one that grabs you by the nuts and forces you to see what you choose to neglect.

A biopic about Ian Curtis, the long lost lead singer of British rock group Joy Division, could easily be named “Love will tear us apart”, go for the easy tear, build another rock myth and get the easy buck. Photographer Anton Corbijn instead, names it Control and makes a movie about gradually losing exactly that. Until there is no myth to hang on to.

So are french fries in fact Belgian? If they are, what is Belgium’s stance regarding Iraq? And does “french” mean to chop and slice in a certain way instead of the obvious place of origin? If so, how are freedom fries supposed to be sliced? A cultural mixup is on the rise and getting confused is the first step to appreciate the need to understand and try harder towards that direction. Julie Delpy has one foot in France and the other in the US. Since she’s a movie maker what else could her movie be about?

It’s a known fact around the world, a universal truth if you may, that one man’s wealth is another man’s poverty. It’s not Marxism or any other profound theory, just common logic. When a country can provide cheaper labor, then its neighbors will come running, leaving their own people unemployed. Cheap labor means a license […]

It’s hard enough to concentrate on a film that brings the word “erotica” to mind, without the lover reminding you of “Bluto” Blutarsky. That’s what happened to me when I saw Lady Chatterley, a nice but spineless interpretation of that notorious old novel which deals with a married noble girl’s love for her husband’s […]

There used to be a time when comic books were considered objects of corruption by our mothers and the rest of the adult world. Seduction of the Innocent? The Comics Code? Those were the days. Kids were almost hiding the new MAD inside porn mags. That made comics an even greater pleasure. A boy’s first symbolic revolution against something he couldn’t define yet. Then, those boys became it… but with a friendlier face. Geeky new age parents that understand their children and share their interests. How cool… not.

I can’t remember when I last last one-–maybe that Sidney Lumet disaster with Vin Diesel–but courtroom dramas have a big advantage: nobody in the audience really knows anything about the law. So, as far as plot twists are concerned, anything goes. That’s pretty much the story with Fracture, although we don’t see much of the […]