Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Dialogic Cinephilia - July 21, 2020

Bradley, S.A. "What Are Your Limits? The Dark Waters of Exploitation and Extreme Cinema." Hellbent for Horror #5 (April 27, 2016)

Bromwich, David. "The Limited Virtues of Vice." The New York Review of Books (January 5, 2019)

Burr, Ty, et al. "Once Upon a Time in Tarantino's World." Open Source (August 8, 2019)  ["Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is many things, but let’s start with two. First, it’s a meticulous reconstruction of Los Angeles in the 1960s—sunlight angling through smog, the game faces of white guys, their lingo, their cars, and car radios, their hair, their self-pity—all at the moment of the Manson murders in Benedict Canyon: August 9, 1969. At the same time the movie’s a flight of fancy into an alternative ending for a horror story, yet another take on violence from the bloody-minded moralist Tarantino. Back in 1969, a “demented and seductive vortex of tension was building” in Hollywood, Didion wrote: “the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.” And when the shocking news of midnight murder in the hills was confirmed, what she remembered—and wished she didn’t—was that “no one was surprised.” There’s the context of 1969 in which Quentin Tarantino has placed his own invention, a buddy flick with Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt cast as a downwardly mobile actor and his stunt-man sidekick. There’s propulsive energy and fun in this movie, and a strange beauty, too."]

Ford, Phil and J.F. Martel. "The Dark Eye: On the Films of Rodney Ascher." Weird Studies #12 (May 2, 2018) ["American filmmaker Rodney Ascher is a master of the weird documentary. Whether he be exploring wild interpretations of a classic horror film in Room 237, bracketing the phenomenon of sleep paralysis in The Nightmare, studying the uncanny power of the moving image in "Primal Screen," or considering the sinister power of a kitschy logo in "The S from Hell," Ascher confronts his viewers with realities that resist final explanations and facile reduction. In this episode, Phil and JF follow Ascher's films into the living labyrinth of a strange universe that isn't just unknown, but radically unknowable."]

Hudson, David. "Coping." Current (July 14, 2020) ["Kaufman sees mental well-being “as a site of sanctity that must be tended to and preserved,” especially when the news is “an infinite scroll of death, devastation, and disappointing leadership, while our ongoing state of social distancing means there are scant opportunities ‘for the simple harbor of a hug’ (words from the poet Grace Nichols). The temptation can be to languish in hysterical despair and to deny the opportunity for relief because it feels like a gross indulgence, but who does it serve when you make yourself an invisible martyr to the ills of the world?” Art “valorizes the quiet stirrings we have to live by bolder instincts.”"]

---. "Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods." Current (June 11, 2020)

Kuersten, Erich. "Nightmare USA: : 10 Wild, Weird Gems of Off-Brand 70s Horror Americana (via Stephen Thrower)." Acidemic (July 17, 2020)

Phillips, Alastair and Julian Stringer, eds. Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts. Routledge, 2007.

Tafoya, Scout. "Reincarnation of Cool: Bertrand Bonello and Zombi Child." Notebook (October 18, 2019) ["The enormity of colonization, the way its mindset bled through to the colonized and continued in insidious ways even when it was legally abolished. Slavery is indeed more ghastly than any knife-wielding maniac, and Bonello’s been saying so for the last decade of his career."]

West, Stephen. "Plato." Philosophize This! (June 20, 2013)

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