Dialogic Cinephilia: Dialogic Cinephilia

Monday, November 19, 2018

Dialogic Cinephilia - November 19, 2018

Tony Kaye's Detachment is a powerful meditation on teacher-cogs and disadvantaged students caught in the corporatizing, underfunded, bureaucratic educational system. Told through the viewpoint of a long term substitute teacher caught in his own mind, who slowly opens up to the world in his slow awakening as a result of his interaction with two youths (one in his class and one on the streets). I particularly appreciated the glimpses into the minds (literally) of many of the main characters and slipstream manner of the narration. One of the best films about teaching I have seen, especially as it develops the main character as a fully fleshed out, problematic and conflicted force in a chaotic environment, not the stereotypical heroic force of simplistic Hollywood feel good teaching movies or the simplistic bad apple that privatized education advocates seek to portray teachers as. Besides being a great film of teaching and students, it is universal in its portrayal of workers struggling make sense and make a difference (or not) in an uncaring system/institution. It is difficult to communicate to people who do not teach the emotional havoc of this profession ... a good attempt to do so... -- Michael Dean Benton

Erwin, Blaine and Alyssa Hain. "Top 25 Censored News Stories of 2017 - 2018: #20 Extravagant Hospital Waste of Unused Medical Supplies." Project Censored (October 2, 2018)

Hemphill, Jim. "Into the Spotlight: Bradley Cooper on A Star is Born, Consulting with Terrence Malick and Shooting his First Feature in 42 Days." Filmmaker 104 (Fall 2018)

Lennard, Natasha. "Even the FBI Thinks Police Have Links to White Supremacists — but Don’t Tell the New York Times." The Intercept (November 5, 2018)

Jone, Alan. "Killing the Mother: Luca Guadagnino Discusses Suspiria." Notebook (November 16, 2018)

Kalven, Jamie. "Chicago Faces a Defining Moment in Police Reform and Civil Order." The Intercept (August 15, 2018)

The characters. I was interested in writing about marriage, middle-aged marriage, and about hitting up against this ceiling of what your expectations were and where you are now - that zone. And then, in vitro, dealing with fertility and stuff, was something that I had dealt with myself. When I was doing my own IVF, a very good friend said, "Oh, you should really write about this." I was like, "I am not ever writing about this. Forget it." And then, of course, here I am because it became the perfect metaphor.
Some people are probably more conscious about the way they start writing, but I am not. I'm sort of unconscious, or self-conscious. I have a general sort of thing, and then I start going after it and then what exactly I'm interested in starts revealing itself. It's like mining or looking at tea leaves - writing material, finding these characters and then trusting the rational part of your brain that something's going on in there. Eventually, a structure starts revealing itself. One of the things that I realized that the movie had in a structural way was an exploration of women at biological moments in their life and how it impacts them as people. There's a women in menopause, Molly Shannon, who's dealing with an empty nest thing. There is an insanely fertile [women who does] not have any interest in having a child, and there's a person who is hitting the end of that [period]. I remember writing a pretentious note to myself: "The biological tyranny of the female condition." I was like, "Oh, that's what the movie's kind of about." - Tamara Jenkins in Salovaara, Sara. "Moment of Conception." Filmmaker #104 (Fall 2018): 33.