Debating Inglourious Basterds
“It’s a little early in the morning for explosions and war,” Butch (Bruce Willis) tells his girlfriend Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. He might be right; it depends on your idea of fun.
All posts tagged: Hollywood
Winter 2009: Volume 63, Number 2
Claire Denis, Militant Politics in Cinema, True Blood.
READ: Fugitive Faces, Catcalling, Debating Inglourious Basterds, and The H-Man vs Liquid Human
The Future in Labor
“You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, ‘cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that’s it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren’t in, when it’s all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for …”
Send in the Cyborgs
On August 7, 1974, above the morning commuters, Philippe Petit stepped out on a high wire extended between the World Trade Center twin towers. The exploit brought the French acrobat huge celebrity, token rebukes, and a new life: he became Artist-in-Residence at the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York.
Post Festum
Attending film festivals involves a kind of ideological whiplash even more intense than does being a regular cinemagoer, if only because the contradictions are more compressed in space and time. The New York Film Festival’s promotional trailer, shown before every screening, says it all.
On Looking Back
FQ Editor Rob White charts a course through the Autumn 2008 issue, on the occasion of FQ’s golden anniversary. In the fall of 1958, fifty years ago, the inaugural issue of Film Quarterly was published, and it is fascinating to revisit those first years, when the European New Wave cinemas generated a scintillating critical energy in a pioneer magazine. In this anniversary issue, founding editor Callenbach recalls FQ’s origins and traces the development of its agenda; James S. Williams argues that Antonioni’s cinema opened up whole “new spaces of thought and being”; while D. A. Miller reconsiders Visconti’s epic melodrama and its strange “larval beauty.”
Arthouse Elephant
Film Quarterly covers a selection of recent films (including re-releases) in greater detail than is possible in many other publications. The balance of reasonable timeliness and in-depth analysis reflects our policy of combining the best qualities of journalism and academic writing.
American Mess
Many viewers and reviewers rehearsed a familiar anxiety about Todd Haynes’s fantasia on Bob Dylan, I’m Not There. How much do you have to know, going in, to be an ideal viewer of this film? Do you have be a lifelong fan, a Dylan-ologist, a child of the 1960s? A student of semiotics, as the director once was?
Spring 2008: Volume 61, Number 3
Godard, Bereavement films, Ominous dramas, The Wire, Parisian cinema, frame-capturing, and film culture in Rome
READ: Easy Words, The End, Cyperpicketing, and American Mess
A Backlot in Bulgaria
When Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, The Guardian (2006), a film about Coast Guard rescue workers set in North Carolina and Alaska, was preparing to shoot there. Was it some eerie coincidence that this Coast Guard rescue movie had picked Louisiana? Hardly. It is just less expensive to build a wave tank there than in Los Angeles.