The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions
Category “Movies”
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
The thing about the sublime as an aesthetic (or religious) emotion is that you can only take it in small doses before it turns into unease and even fear. At one point in Werner Herzog’s new, amazing documentary about the astonishingly realistic Paleolithic paintings in Chauvet Cave in France, the filmmaker notes that he and […]
The Martians’ Horrific Geometry
“He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong…” H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” A surprising number of features on Mars show qualities at least somewhat suggestive of having been sculpted not […]
UFOs and the Midlife Crisis
I’ve obviously been thinking a lot about UFOs in the last couple months—duh—so out of a sense of blogging duty I thought I should get out my DVD of Close Encounters and watch it again, and perhaps comment on it. It has been a couple years. I totally disagree with Spielberg’s overt premise—that ETs are […]
Cool Old Documentary
A classic, cool UFO documentary from the 1970s, UFOs Are Here!, has just been made available online. It features Jacques Vallee, Kenneth Arnold, J. Allen Hynek, and others–even Steven Spielberg. Skip past the sorta cheesy new tacked-on preamble by Stan Deyo (first 10 minutes).
… Speaking of Blade Runner
I have just paused Blade Runner: The Final Cut. It has taken me, what, two years, to watch this version, I guess because I’m so attached to The Director’s Cut that I was afraid of being disappointed. But this version is better (so far). The changes are very subtle, almost unnoticeable (mostly slight editing tweaks), […]
The Vanishing
Everyone has those thoughts, but no one ever jumps. I told myself: “Imagine you’re jumping.” Is it predestined that I won’t jump? How can it be predestined that I won’t? So, to go against what is predestined, one must jump. I jumped. The fall was a holy event. I broke my left arm and lost […]
Star Wars is a remake of Ordinary People
Some films get sort of obscured, in hindsight, not only by their own famousness or popularity, but also by standard interpretations. Rashomon is one example: The handy notion that Kurosawa’s classic is about relativism, different people having multiple points of view, has essentially controlled our viewing of that film since it was released. Yet the […]
Kubrick, Lynch, the Bardo
David Lynch seems like someone who gets possessed by a question and won’t let up until he tires of the question (not, that is, until he answers it—the questions he asks aren’t answerable, probably). The question in his recent films, at least, seems to be: What is Woman made of? Or maybe it is some […]
The black monolith
Well, there are many kinds of films. Most of them, nowadays, don’t demand much thinking. That makes me very, very upset. It makes me upset that they think the audiences have grown unused to thinking and that they only want things spelled out for them, in a platter. That’s bullshit, and a big one. People […]
