Columns
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Lady Vengeance: Last Minute Gift Guide for Genre Buffs
Still not sure what to get your comic-book-obsessed little brother? Forget to pick up something for mom that satisfies her cinematic blood lust? The following gifts are Lady Vengeance approved, and most arrive just in time for December 25th. For the Low-Brow Art Lover: Crazy4Cult: Cult Movie Art (Gallery 1988/Kevin Smith, $25) The currently out-of-fashion but undeniably hard-working Kevin Smith has teamed up with the LA-based Gallery 1988 to collect the best in good, pulpy, sometimes downright dirty artwork inspired by cult films. The aesthetic style and subject matter is fairly diverse, meaning there’s something for everyone. […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #56
Second #56, 43:52 The implied violence before the explicit violence, as the patterns and objects of Dorothy’s apartment have settled into a merciless, strict formalism. The fact of Dorothy’s bare leg, the tenderness of her foot upon the carpeting, sets a machine in motion somewhere. In his monumental, multi-volume work Rising Up and Rising Down, William T. Vollmann explains his reasons for exploring violence in such calculus-like detail: “I wanted to find a base point beneath which we couldn’t go—the ‘floor’ of evil. I could then note that the fall would not be bottomless. I might hit it and die […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #55
Second #2585, 43:05 Frank has, as they say, arrived. And he is one suave motherfucker. Bourbon in hand, he commands the room. He is Sinatra minus the musical talent. He barks at Dorothy, as if he himself was the director of Blue Velvet: he orders her to light the set and arrange the props. Then he directs her in her performance, forcing her into a brutalizing form of Method acting. For Dorothy is clearly acting for Frank, in the same was that Isabella Rosselleni is acting for Lynch, and for us. Her apartment suddenly has been transformed—with the entrance of […]
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Sleepless Nights Stories — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Sleepless Nights Stories opens theatrically at the Anthology Film Archives on Thursday, December 15, 2011. Visit their website to learn more.) December can be perverse, especially in New York. Underneath the jingling bells, cinnamon, and pine, the promises and obligations to keep, there’s a pervasive anxiety about the dying light. Time flattens the remaining days like a steamroller as we frantically categorize our memories into lists of ten and wrap it all up in colored paper and ribbons. This can create a hectic, merry numbness that doesn’t subside until January’s hangover, when the cold is undeniable. Perhaps the timing is […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #54
Second #2538, 42:18 Frank has arrived, banging on the door. The fact that we anticipated his arrival makes it no less terrifying. Jeffrey—naked—has been shuttled into the closet, while Dorothy ditches the knife behind the radiator, in one of Blue Velvet’s many sly, tension-breaking references to Eraserhead. In Art and Fear, Paul Virilio reminds us that the coming of sound in film in the late 1920s effectively transformed silence into something alien, almost a special effect: Yet one crucial aspect of this mutation of the seventh art has been too long ignored and that is the arrival of the talkies. […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #53
Second #2491, 41:31 “Get over there on that couch,” Dorothy says, and then follows Jeffrey (naked except for his black socks), knife raised, as if she would plunge it into his back were he to hesitate. The frame practically vibrates in anticipation of the coming of some dark force against which this tableau is nothing but a pale rehearsal. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Gilles Deleuze writes that the frame is related to an angle of framing. This is because the closed set is itself an optical system which refers to a point of view on the set of parts. […]
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Lady Vengeance: The Genre Fan’s Guide to Jim Henson
By now many have experienced the clever, goofy, unfiltered joy of The Muppets, a film whose success reflects the plight of its characters – out of the spotlight for far too long and working their way back into the the public consciousness. While the film’s potent mix of charm and nostalgia is undeniable (if you didn’t tear up during the performance of Rainbow Connection, you’re inhuman), it might leave some of us hungry for more, and I don’t mean the soft stuff. While the film is true to one facet of Henson’s work, he was a mad, prolific genius who got involved with […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #52
Second #2444, 40:44 The still frame, so much like a photograph that it takes a violent deformation of reality to make it move. Jeffrey and Dorothy, frozen eternally in a film that has stuttered to a stop. In John Ashbery’s long poem Girls on the Run, there are these lines: I’ll go you one better, Fred chimed in, here’s a diver, let’s call her Josephine, who dives and dives, further and downward, all our lives’ span, to the basis of that bridge. Dorothy and Jeffrey have taken the dive that trembles us into fear, and prevents us from following. So […]
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Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It is being released theatrically by Focus Features on 12.09.11.) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy plays out like a long game of chess whose pieces are constantly being moved across the board without ever reaching checkmate. Each of the many players thinks himself a king, but one by one they’re shown to be little more than glorified pawns. The narrative they collectively form is at once dense but fluttering, broken into tiny fragments whose value as clues and signifiers is constantly being called into question and, once thoroughly vetted, reassembled into something […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #51
Second #51, 39:57 What is this world? Like piecing together a puzzle over an abyss, we are witnessing the scene of a crime conveyed in secret code. We know, of course, that Dorothy will not kill Jeffrey, but somehow this fact only makes matters worse. The murderers and the murdered. In her never-out-of-date book Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, Anne Friedberg writes that as soon as the photographic negative made possible a standardized image, photography and then cinematography made possible the seeing of exactly the same image(s) over time. Film experiences had an unprecedented repeatability. . . This notion […]
