“Death is not the worst. There are things more horrible than death.” – Count Dracula (played by Klaus Kinski) Blood on your cool Pronounced and menacing, Werner Herzog’s redaction of Nosferatu should not be viewed, as he insists, as a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 horror classic of German silent cinema––what Herzog describes as […]
Pulling Focus
Pulling Focus: They Live (1988)
“They Live is one of the best films of a fine American director.” – Martin Scorsese California Über Alles In 1985 or thereabouts, around the time John Carpenter was taking a detour from his exploitation horror films to do the more family-friendly live-action cartoon Big Trouble in Little China, “The Master of Horror”––as he […]
Pulling Focus: Being There (1979)
Take a chance on me Peter Sellers’ sans pareil performance – also his penultimate – as Chance, the gardener, idiot savant exemplar, is a disarmingly taciturn portrait, and the discerning centerpiece of Hal Ashby’s oft omitted masterpiece from 1979, Being There. Ashby directed several seminal pictures throughout the 1970s, including such substantial works as Harold […]
Pulling Focus: Whiplash (2014)
Are you one of those single tear people? I saw Whiplash for the first time at the 2014 Vancouver International Film Festival, in a packed house with director Damien Chazelle in attendance. I’d heard rumblings of distant thunder about the film earlier that year when it took Sundance by storm, and where it was dubbed […]
Pulling Focus: Johnny Guitar (1954)
“Johnny Guitar is surely one of the most blatant psychosexual melodramas ever to disguise itself in that most commodious of genres, the Western.” – Roger Ebert Anyone can play guitar “I’m gonna kill you,” spits a venomous Emma Small, played with evil élan by Mercedes McCambridge, to the legendary Joan Crawford (Forsaking All Others, […]
Pulling Focus: Breaking the Waves (1996)
“Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves is a genuinely spiritual movie that asks ‘what is love and what is compassion?’” – Martin Scorsese In a broken dream Set in remote North-West Scotland’s Outer Hebrides of the 1970s is the ill-at-ease and heart-rending romance of Lars von Trier’s paralyzing (and, alas, polarizing) melodrama, Breaking the […]