There is a moment in director Bong Joon-ho’s celebrated film Parasite (2019), a pivotal moment in my estimation, that brings to mind verses 5:43-45 from Matthew, a portion of a long sermon delivered by Jesus: “You have heard that it… Read More
A film’s opening scene, when done well, may reveal a great deal about the feature’s main character. The establishing credit sequence to Hooper (1978) performs the reveal in a savvy way. A camera pan leads the audience’s attention across a… Read More
When I saw Juan Felipe Herrera perform his verse in Atlanta a few years back, I was struck by the musicality of his delivery. Herrera, the first Mexican-American Poet Laureate (2015-2017), has a jovial, Zen-like presence that simultaneously calms and… Read More
Flicker Alley presents a DVD/Blu-ray combo of the Austrian Film Archive’s restoration of H.K. Breslauer’s 1924 silent film The City Without Jews (Die Stadt ohne Juden), a title whose existence and survival are pretty much miraculous. In the imaginary city… Read More
10. Chouk Bwa and the Ångströmers – Vodou Alé (Bongo Joe) In Haiti, mizik rasin, or roots music, serves important roles in many culturally engaged movements. It has the capacity to tie together past, present, and future in often spiritually-inflected… Read More
10. Chouk Bwa and the Ångströmers – Vodou Alé (Bongo Joe) In Haiti, mizik rasin, or roots music, serves important roles in many culturally engaged movements. It has the capacity to tie together past, present, and future in often spiritually-inflected… Read More
An out-of-time transmission from the late 1990s, when auteurs were fully embracing genre and pre-millennium jitters was tossing old artistic certainties out the window, Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is a spectacular oddity that still confounds… Read More
I love Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis , I love Habibi, and I love Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. However, there’s one word choice that I’ve always hated having to make when talking about these books with other people: Do I tell them… Read More
10. Bridget St. John – Ask Me No Questions (1969, Dandelion) Singer-songwriter Bridget St. John became a British cult figure in the wake of her critically-lauded sophomore LP Songs for the Gentle Man (1971), though it’s in her debut album Ask Me No… Read More
With Eraserhead (1977) there is only ever the first time. Re-watching director David Lynch’s debut feature, the experience is entangled with the impact of that initial viewing. Subsequent screenings lead back to deeper recesses of an experience, remembered as equal… Read More