Last week, Miramax sent me their panties as part of a promotional package for Bridget Jones’s Diary. Now, I am a tremendous believer in panties. I like to look at panties, smell panties, eat them right off the shelf. I adore the vibrant hues of cotton panties, and am tickled by the way polyester panties […]
Jamie Hook
Posted inNews
The Big Question
And why, just maybe, we’re all better off not knowing the answer
In this past century, a 100-year span that opened with the death of Nietzsche and closed with the mapping of the human genome, it has proved harder than ever to believe in God. As science and reason have tumbled through their stunning, acrobatic adolescence, we, as a species, seem increasingly confident of our dominion over […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Water Everywhere
Drifting Down the Tired Suzhou River
All great cities have great rivers that snake through them like great statements. Most often the rivers are filthy, ringed with sin and vice, lazy with corruption. As such, their role is to make fluid the transitions between desire and loss, between ambition and dissipation. They are great places to find love, get drunk, lose […]
Posted inMovies & TV
Mars Needs Women
A Sexual/Spiritual Interpretation of Red Planet
INTRO “This is the best Mars movie because it celebrates man’s ingenuity and asks the big questions about who we are, and what’s going to happen to us.” –Val Kilmer Red Planet is first and foremost a philosophical declaration of mankind’s subconscious desire to seek out and destroy God. The tool, or theory, used to […]
Posted inMovies & TV
The Presence of Genius
Bjork 1, von Trier 0
I AM LISTENING to Björk’s soundtrack for Dancer in the Dark and I am convinced it is poetry. Though comprised of only seven cuts, the world it sees is so vast, so saturated with brilliant lights, fading colors, and haunted ambitions, that it threatens to swallow up director Lars von Trier’s musical entirely. Which, in […]
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Cinema of Infection
Bruno Dumont’s Controversial L’Humanite
WHEN L’HUMANITE’S principal actor and actress were given the highest acting awards at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, many felt the jury had simply gone too far. After all, Dumont had gone out of his way to use non-professionals who had never acted before. Severiné Caneele, the female lead, took her award in almost mute […]
Posted inMovies & TV
The Real Stars of SIFF
Two Hardy Film Fans Enter the Soul of Excess… Annually
FILM IS A POWERFUL AGENT of confusion, especially when taken in massive quantity. The multiplicity of film’s attack on our minds–aural, visual, rhythmic, musical–makes us extraordinarily susceptible to its demands. When the Lumières projected a train arriving at the Gare St. Lazare, and the terrified audience fled the cinema, they did so in a state […]