Film After Film: (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?)
J. Hoberman
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 1844677516
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
One of the world’s most erudite and entertaining film critics on the state of cinema in the post-digital—and post-9/11—age. This witty and allusive book, in the style of classic film theorists/critics like André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, includes considerations of global cinema’s most important figures and films, from Lars von Trier and Zia Jiangke to WALL-E, Avatar and Inception.
Caravaggio (BFI Modern Classics)
Dead Man (BFI Modern Classics)
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (BFI Modern Film Classics)
Moving Places: A Life at the Movies
self-aware cyber-philosophizing, Innocence was indifferently received when shown in competition at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Was it a cartoon trying to pass for something real? 1 Less than a year after Cotton Candy had its world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art, the Musée Mécanique was relocated to a temporary home in heavily touristed Fisherman’s Wharf where, as the New York Times noted, “the games will be neighbors with businesses that sell San Francisco snow globes and ‘Your Face
Mulholland Drive, Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, and Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, not to mention the first installments of the Harry Potter saga and Lord of the Rings.2 The December 2001 press screening for The Lord of the Rings was the first I ever attended where critics were frisked with a hand-wand metal detector and asked to check their cell phones. Although this was clearly a response to the possibility of the movie being pirated, these precautions
that the currently beleaguered FBI and CIA had successfully collaborated on the arrest of one Abdullah al-Muhajir, born Jose Padilla in Brooklyn. Already detained for a month since deplaning in Chicago, Padilla was being held as a military prisoner and suspected of abetting an Al Qaeda plot to produce the very scenario The Sum of All Fears so vividly illustrated—the drama of a nuclear device detonated in an East Coast American city.3 Indeed, the attorney general received another timely cue the
mass amnesia occasioned by Reagan’s funeral is far more crucial—and not just because it provides Dick Cheney’s eulogy. Bush is but a special effect. Death of a President is really a movie about 9/11—an essay on a national tragedy used to create an even greater tragedy. (That’s the scenario that really should have made Senator Clinton “sick.”) It’s also a movie about itself—a demonstration of reality shaped to fit a particular hypothesis. There doesn’t seem to be any irony there. Range saves that
Street). America, as we are often told, is the most Christian nation on earth; Dogville creates a space within which to wonder what exactly that means. Grace is unwillingly reunited with her (God)father and, as the fate of the hapless town hangs in the balance, these two Hollywood deities sit in the back seat of a chauffeured automobile pedantically debating the definition of arrogance, discussing the quality of mercy and parsing the nature of human nature. Dogville has a horrifying denouement,