The Tree of Life (2011)

Posted on June 26, 2011
Filed Under contemporary, films

Terrence Malick’s stunning visual poem is about what it means to be human in an uncaring universe, our existential joys and terrors, the fraught wonders and painful mysteries of childhood, the end of innocence and the dream of redemption, the terrible beauty of Creation (no matter how it came to be) and our appalling distance from God (whatever that means to you). This simple story about a troubled, loving 1950s family in small-town Texas is urgently contemporary. The Tree of Life is a film about our stormy times, our riven country, our stubborn American Way, about what we do right and what we do wrong and the way we keep doing it all over and over and over again. For Malick the first fork in life’s tree divides nature and grace, and we cling to the wrong branch. The Tree of Life confronts our magnificent, soulless, trivial, violent American world with an achingly beautiful scream of protest: It doesn’t have to be this way. Read more

Rats. Russell Crowe is Jor-El in Zack Snyder’s Superman movie.

Posted on June 19, 2011
Filed Under animation, contemporary, film news

Warner Bros. announced last week that Russell Crowe has joined the cast of Man of Steel, the upcoming Superman film to be directed by Zack Snyder. This is depressing news.

I’m disheartened not by Crowe, an actor I admire, but by the role he’s playing: Jor-El, the Kryptonian scientist who… (gritted teeth)… saves his infant son from Krypton’s imminent destruction by sending him in a spaceship to Earth, where the boy is adopted by simple country folk Jonathan and Martha Kent and soon discovers… oh bloody hell. Read more

Star-crossed visionaries and real-life Mad Men

Posted on June 12, 2011
Filed Under books, early television

Television exploded into popular culture in the years after the Second World War. Nearly all of the TV pioneers whose names are still remembered (however faintly) worked in the late 1940s and 1950s, when the introduction of affordable television sets made it possible to create truly national networks that offered programming to a significant fraction of the American population. It was in those years that America went bananas for Uncle Miltie, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, Ed Sullivan, J. Fred Muggs, Ernie Kovacs, Arthur Godfrey and Kukla, Fran and Ollie. This was the dawn of the Mad Men era, when television grew from a scattered collection of experimental stations into a powerful national medium presenting primetime programming owned and controlled by sponsors and ad agencies. Much of it was performed live under killing conditions. Today it’s remembered as a Golden Age. Here’s long-time CBS designer and producer Bob Markell reminiscing in Jeff Kesseloff’s endlessly engaging The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961 (Viking, 1995). Read more

Recently


Categories


Archives


Blogroll