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Bombast #68
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the peculiar phenomenon of growing up parodic—that is, of having experienced the world, almost from the cradle, through the distorted lens of farce. And, lo and...
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Bombast #69
Last week, in my musings about the thin line between engaging with and becoming caught up in the self-perpetuating, self-justifying hamster wheel of pop culture, I mentioned Rihanna’s gimmick 777...
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Bombast #70
You could do worse for career advice than consulting Wizard, though Peter Boyle’s monologue does leave a few dangling questions. Some time ago I saw a documentary called Je t’aime… moi non plus:...
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Bombast #71
At the Buechenwald camp gate stood a niche for the watchdog. A chained beast barked at passers-by, and greedily buried its snout in its bowl of mush. Even though the beast never stood up on its hind...
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Bombast #72
Tom Hooper does just about everything that a director can do to render his screen adaptation of Les Misérables unwatchable—which is only to be expected. I had known that there was something very wrong...
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Bombast #74
You find yourself doing a lot of things over the holidays and break—if you are lucky enough to have a holiday break—that you might otherwise not. One example is socially drinking for thirty...
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Bombast #76
Every month or so for the past year and some change, Cristina Cacioppo, programmer at 92YTribeca has been good enough to locate and screen a 35mm film print of a title determined by myself and my...
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Bombast #77
The Tri-Star Pictures Pegasus, galloping towards my living room, is for me today the very image of childhood—such is the persistence of production logos in the mind. (Speaking of, I am certain I don’t...
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Bombast #78
Every so often I will run into an old acquaintance, or get a random text message, and have to field the question “Are you still in New York?” There is often a hint of incredulity to this, while that...
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Bombast #79
“Twitter, blogs, enriched media… They’re all fads.” Boris McGiver as Tom Hammerschmidt, editor-in-chief of the Washington Herald, House of Cards Some time ago I wrote in this column that “’What...
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Bombast #80
Joseph Aloysius Dwan was born in Toronto in 1885, when the future megalopolis’s population was only around 100,000. He died in December of 1981, aged 96, in California. In between, Dwan had taken up...
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Bombast #81
Slow news week in film culture®. A middling second-string critic parted ways in a snit with The Village Voice, which really hasn’t been readable since Mailer left, prompting a languorous yawn of...
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Bombast #82
For obvious reasons, Garrison Keillor has always irked me—the “Stupid TV! Be more funny!” gag on The Simpsons covers it—but never more than when he sweepingly opines on the nature of being Midwestern....
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Bombast #83
“Yesterday, that might have meant something… Now it means nothing, nothing at all.” That’s Gloria Grahame at the end of 1950’s In a Lonely Place. Grahame plays a young woman named Laurel Gray, who...
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True/False 2013: Two Freewheeling Takes On the Doc Fest
This year’s True/False Film Festival took place from February 28 to March 3, 2013 in Columbia, Missouri. While this was the tenth annual iteration of the documentary festival, film critics Nick...
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Bombast #84
Returning to television after a long absence, you experience an uncanny feeling that you would never know without the break—let’s call it “commercial shock.” In what seems to be a fairly common...
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Bombast #85
Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, which opens today, will be hashed over in print and Internet forums for weeks to come. I have already filed my thoughts on the movie for Sight & Sound, and have...
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SXSW 2013: Two Takes on Austin’s Cinema Carnival
This year’s South By Southwest Film Festival took place from March 7-16, 2013 in Austin, Texas. This year marked the 20th year in which film was a component of the SXSW conference, which now...
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Bombast #86
The Sweet Science is joined onto the past like a man’s arm to his shoulder. - A.J. Liebling Last week I watched exactly one moving picture—an Omnimax production about the migratory patterns of Monarch...
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Bombast #87
A couple of months ago, I wrote about my first encounter with the print edition of a flimsy ‘zine called Reverse Shot, just suitably sized for fanning one’s self, which I discovered in the lobby...
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Bombast #88
During “Jerry Lewis: Live in Concert,” which I attended at Long Island’s Westbury Music Fair last Saturday, the 87-year-old performer spoke on dozens of occasions of his allegiance to his audience, of...
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Bombast #90
Trying to explain my problem with Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers in a review for Sight & Sound some weeks ago, I fell back on a mind far finer than my own, borrowing from Andrew Sarris in The...
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Bombast #91
If outrage in my social media feed is an accurate measure of importance, the most important event of this week was The New York Times’ Fashion & Style section dispatching a lamestain named Lord...
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Bombast #92
Ray Harryhausen died on Tuesday. The sense of loss was acute, as for many of us, Harryhausen had been a living link—an artery, even—to irreplaceable childhood memories. Even among people who’ve never...
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Bombast #93
Among that subset of the population that cares about such things—a population rivaling that of the Sumatran rhino—there is something like a Delmer Daves revival afoot. This Tuesday, the Criterion...
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Bombast #94
I have a recurring dream—not an uncommon one, I’ve gathered—in which I’m forced to go back to high school. A clerical error is discovered, some minor oversight, and it turns out I was a few credit...
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Bombast #95
The Internet has many uses, and foremost among these is providing multiple forums for people to register their flummoxed, spluttering indignence about one thing or another. Most of the outrage seems...
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Bombast #96
What is Vulgar Auteurism? If a May 24 primer in the Voice Media Group’s New York City paper is any indication, it’s a shameless attention grab. A critical tool of any use? Not so much. Yet all the...
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Bombast #97
There is unquestionably a future for movies, but it’s unclear if the form that movies will take in this future will resemble anything like the form they’ve taken in the last century. Steven Soderbergh...
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Bombast #98
When in Saugerties, Ulster County, New York state, be sure to visit the Orpheum Theatre. Reading comments in the invaluable cinematreasures.org website, I have learned that the Orpheum has perhaps a...
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Bombast #99
The first time I watched The Secret of NIMH, if my memory serves, was in the break room at La Petite France, in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, where I’d been stowed while waiting for my mother’s...
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Bombast #100
Technically this is my 101st weekly column in this space, given that the last couple of weeks were devoted to a two-parter covering two of my very favorite subjects, boundless sorrow and...
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Bombast #101
I’ve been working YouTube music links into this column for as long as I’ve been writing it—at first wherever they fit, later as a send-off. Usually the chosen song has some vague thematic connection...
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Bombast #102
I first visited Montréal on July, 13, 2001, when I was twenty, on a meandering road trip with my then-girlfriend. It’s easy to date: Sigur Rós’ album Ágætis byrjun had then recently been released in...
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Bombast #103
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “PUNK: Chaos to Couture,” a fashion exhibit organized by the museum’s Costume Institute, will close in a couple of weeks. Though it will retire as a success,...
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Bombast #104
25 SITUATIONS ONLY FILM PPL CAN UNDERSTAND I BET YOU RECOGNIZE AT LEAST 1 OF THESE!!! IF U LIKE PLEASE FWD. : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : )...
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Bombast #105
I don’t know what it is exactly that movies do. I’m still working on it. There are, though, at least two things that they do particularly well: adding an additional element of choreographed...
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Bombast #106
Californians always think of sex Or think of death - The Fall, “C’n'C-S Mithering,” from 1980’s Grotesque (After the Gramme). If that’s true—and The Fall’s Mark E. Smith did marry a Los Angelino, Brix...
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Bombast #109
“If it were just a question of mutilating bodies the way that hack-and-slash movies often do, I wouldn’t find extreme imagery interesting. People often say to me, ‘Why don’t you do it the way...
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Bombast #110
I’ve failed to go to the Toronto International Film Festival so many times in my life as a critic that I might as well pretend that I’m boycotting it, rather than being merely too lazy and distracted...
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Bombast #111
If you read about movies enough, you will repeatedly encounter certain stock phrases meant to explain, in shorthand, the historical and sociological forces at play in pop cultural movements. “Nuclear...
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Bombast #112
The cult of family, I suspect, is responsible for a great deal of the wickedness in this world. So many things that are done for family—that noblest and most totalizing of causes—must necessarily be...
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Bombast #113
Can there be such a thing as too much virtuosity? Certainly every time that Floyd Mayweather, Jr., among the greatest defensive boxers in the history of the sport, delivers another of his slippery...
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Bombast #114
In the 1926 short story “Pickman’s Model,” the narrator’s sanity has been frayed by a brush with things beyond everyday comprehension, with beings eldritch and architectures cyclopean. “You needn’t...
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Bombast #115
When Lou Reed died this week, the obituary consensus was that we’d lost the embodiment of “New York cool”—though if that really was all that there was to the man and his art, I would’ve said “Good...
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Bombast #116
While the etymology of the word “blockbuster” is unclear, most of the best guesses have it originating sometime during World War II. It was coined in reference to heavy-duty incendiary bombs—4,000 lbs...
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Bombast #117
Alexander Payne and Wes Anderson both make comedies, albeit comedies laced with strychnine and a dab of treacle. They are less than a decade apart in age—Payne was born in 1961, Anderson in ’69—and...
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Bombast #118
[Through the magic of cinema, the author of this piece appears to perform a one-finger handstand pushup, playing the role of Merlin Forbes in 1997’s That Darn Genie Kat.] I must ask for more than the...
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Bombast #119
Making art is an expensive habit. If your family was rich to begin with, you’ll drain their resources in pursuit of that habit, with long odds of paying dividends in the end. If nothing else, your...
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Bombast #120
Like everyone else, I’ve been sworn to silence on the subject of The Wolf of Wall Street, but I don’t suppose anyone at Paramount Pictures will mind my saying that it’s one of the best American...
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