Category Archives: films

Is it art? Or is it video art?

While I have been focusing recently on the sheer volume of activity on UMW Blogs, that really is a fleeting fascination with the possibility of creating a dynamic network for teaching and learning. Nonetheless, the magic of such a collaboration … Continue reading

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They’re here! They’re here!

Here is a fun film comparison. Two of my favorite Philip Kaufman films are Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1976) and The Wanderers (1979). On the surface these two films seem so radically different given their distinct genre and stylistic … Continue reading

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UbuWeb: the videos

From their site: UbuWeb: The YouTube of the Avant-Garde: UbuWeb has converted all of its rare and out-of-print film & video holdings to on-demand streaming formats à la YouTube, which means that you can view everything right in your browser … Continue reading

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Cassavetes’s Husbands: Death, Funerals, and New York

“[Cassavetes] replaces the exhausted artifices of conventional movies with a new set of pseudo-realistic ones, which are mostly instantaneous clichés. As a writer-director, he’s so dedicated to revealing the pain under the laughter he’s a regular Pagliacci.” – Pauline Kael, … Continue reading

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Who needs Netflix with the Internet Archive around?

Over the last month or so I have been scouring the Internet Archive for pubic domain films. Below are 31 of the 38 movies I bookmarked in del.icio.us that are currently available at Internet Archive (del.icio.us seems to be balking … Continue reading

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Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Italian Dance Party

Antonella and I have embarked on what we hope will be a fairly comprehensive retrospective of Italian Cinema in an attempt to answer one deceptively simple question, “What the hell went wrong?!” How did one of the most imaginative and … Continue reading

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The Killers (1946): What’s the idea?

I posted a little while back about a few of my favorite noirs, and decided to re-visit one of the films from the list: The Killers (1946). I truly love this film, and on yet another go round I’m beginning … Continue reading

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A musical interlude from Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1964)…

The children sing “Mommy Dear” and given the logic of this film it is just a downright chillingly beautiful scene.

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Clare Quilty, or my excuse for talking about the limits of auteur theory

In the early 90s (probably 1993), I went to the Directors Guild of America to see a Peter Sellers retrospective. I was not a huge Sellers fan at that point. I had seen him a couple of times on the … Continue reading

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Mad Max: The Art of the Stunt

Mad Max is an amazing movie for many, many reasons (read a fun review here). And having seen the 2000 re-release at the Film Forum in NYC with Australian accents and slang restored, I can safely say that I have … Continue reading

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