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Grizzly Man
Last night I saw Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005). Knowing little beyond the basics (a man lives with bears and they eat him) I found it quite surprising. I was expecting Timothy Treadwell to be an extreme or even insane environmentalist, but what really struck me is how completely normal he is: he’s a stereotypical […]
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La grande bellezza
This week I saw La grande bellezza (2013) at the Barbican, and thoroughly enjoyed it. As seemingly every review has remarked, it is deeply reminiscent of Fellini. Although it would be difficult to ignore Fellini as the film’s spiritual forebear and a major influence, Sorrentino’s film feels novel, never derivative. It falls somewhere between La […]
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Meek’s Cutoff
Meek’s Cutoff (2010) is a beautifully-shot film in which characters follow the Oregon Trail. On the surface it sounds like a standard wagon western, like Stagecoach (1939) or Red River (1948), but it couldn’t be more different.
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CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
I first came across George Saunders in a New York Times piece on his new novel, and due to its high praise, I proposed his first book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996), to my book club a few months ago. I read it in two days, and even though many of the stories are a […]
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Orphans of the Storm
I’ll admit that I’m not as into silent films as I should be. Since I started tracking films, only around 2% of the films I’ve seen have been silent. However much it damages my cinephile credentials, I will admit that I find the majority of silent films boring and a bit of a struggle, so […]
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WordPress from Vim
I’ve made a few tweaks to Vim which make it simple to blog to a WordPress blog (like this one). Originally I was using VimRepress but I had a few issues with it. I then discovered blogit.vim which just seems to work better for me. I didn’t like the massively long lines, so I had […]
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The Untouchable
This week I finished John Banville’s The Untouchable, a moving chronicle of longing, reminiscence, and sadness. It is a book about memory and about the act of remembering, too personal to really be called a history, despite the fact that it’s based on real people and events. Memory for Banville is much sadder than it is […]
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Boudu Saved from Drowning
According to Wikipedia, Pauline Kael called Boudu sauvé des eaux (1932) “not only a lovely fable about a bourgeois attempt to reform an early hippy…but a photographic record of an earlier France.” Although it is an enjoyable film with strong performances, I found it to be more problematic than Kael did.
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Beeminder
Lately I’ve gotten very addicted (in a good way) to Beeminder. It’s a site that allows you to set quantifiable goals, then it tracks your progress on them. If you fall behind on your goal (called “de-railing” in Beeminder parlance), then you can pledge money to stay on track. If you de-rail again, the money […]
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The Gospel According to St. Matthew
Because the only Pasolini film I had previously seen was the harrowing Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), I began The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1963) with some trepidation. I expected it to be dark, visceral, and transgressive. It turns out to be a refreshingly straightforward adaptation of the book of Matthew, […]