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

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (2010)

Posted on May 8, 2011
Filed Under contemporary, films

The wild cherry in William’s back yard was glorious this spring.

William Burroughs was captivating and appalling. He wrote harsh, transcendently funny books that electrified generations of alienated young people and inspired countless artists, musicians, filmmakers and writers—and do so today. He dragged world literature into the Digital Age. Language is a virus from outer space is the most acute insight into the human condition offered by any writer of the twentieth century. (YouTube is a huge, half-explicated Burroughsian cut-up.) Read more

The Plan 9 remake is shooting in Virginia. Oh my.

Posted on April 1, 2011
Filed Under contemporary, Ed Wood, exploitation

Plan 9 Teaser Trailer from Darkstone Entertainment on Vimeo.

This is the teaser trailer for John Johnson’s low-budget remake of Ed Wood’s legendary lowest-budget Plan 9 From Outer Space, which commenced principal photography last Friday in Roanoke, Virginia. The trailer has been online for more than a year, but I only learned of the project when the Roanoke Times story appeared last week. io9 has been on the story from the beginning. Johnson is a true Woodian. The trailer is dedicated to “Ed and his Crew,” and–see the picture below–Johnson directed the first day of shooting in a pink sweater. (Purists will cavil that the sweater doesn’t appear to be angora, but you can’t have everything.) Read more

Film of the catastrophe at Chernobyl (May 1986)

Posted on March 16, 2011
Filed Under contemporary, films

The above film was shot by Vladimir Shevchenko, a cameraman for Central TV in Ukraine, who was admitted into the Chernobyl nuclear power station in May 1986, immediately after the fire was extinguished in Unit 4. Read more

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