Nagisa Oshima, surpassed in Japanese cinema only by Yasujiro Ozu, tends to make movies that are exceptionally harsh and violent; even so, one is not prepared for the cruelty on display in Merry Christmas[,] Mr. Lawrence, Oshima’s adaptation of Afrikaner novelist Laurens Van der Post’s The Seed and the Sower, about cultural and other collisions […]
Monthly Archives: September 2010
Powerful, mesmerizing, intermittently electrifying, Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin shows us, another audience, an audience watching another film, one that we only hear—like a radio drama, with dialogue, human and animal sounds, sound effects, music—from start to finish. We see more than a hundred audience members reacting to it—reactions that projectively become our own. We watch […]
Greta Garbo, cinema’s greatest actress and most intoxicating beauty, played Anna Karenina twice, both times for Clarence Brown, her favorite director: in 1927, in the silent Love; in 1935, in the talkie, which reclaimed two things: the title of Lev Tolstoi’s novel; Anna’s suicidal end, which a happy ending had replaced for the sake of […]
Those who have seen Frederick Wiseman’s documentary Basic Training (1971) or Stanley Kubrick’s fictional Full Metal Jacket (1987), or both, can add Nameha-ye baad, from Iran, to their list of films showing the training of raw military conscripts. In this case, the secluded setting of the army camp is mountainous and snowy, correlative, perhaps, to […]
Following in the steps of Boys Don’t Cry (Kimberly Peirce, 1999) and wife So Yong Kim’s In Between Days (2006), which he co-wrote with her, Bradley Rust Gray has taken the title of The Exploding Girl from another song by the British rock group The Cure, whose bleeding lyric for the 1985 “The Exploding Boy” […]
Dennis Grunes 