Eyes Wide Shut (The Cornfield #53)

We begin the year with a holiday picture, and a review from Film.com in 1999; this was written, as I say below, very quickly after seeing the film, and time has only enhanced my strong feeling for the movie. Having posted a number of things for the absurd idea of “the Cornfield,” I may step [...]

Late August, Early September (The Cornfield #42)

From the Sep./Oct. 1999 issue of Film Comment. I was going to run this in late August or early September, and it’s now Sep. 18. Alors. Do the French make jokes about “French movies?” Roll their eyes at yet another film about young people chatting their way through a procession of cafés and love affairs? [...]

Saving Private Ryan (The Cornfield #41)

From Film.com, first published in 1998. Saving Private Ryan has “masterpiece” written all over it: it sprawls to nearly three hours in length, it is properly measured and somber, it takes on a mighty subject. This is Steven Spielberg in Schindler mode. Private Ryan cannot merely be another war movie, or indeed just another movie. [...]

House of Bamboo (The Cornfield #40)

CinemaScope was de rigueur at Fox at this moment (1955), so here is Samuel Fuller going widescreen for a bright-lit color-filled noir shot in Japan. Like Hell and High Water just before it, it feels as though Fuller is not yet happy about ‘Scope, and unless you have a giant TV it looks very tableau-heavy, with small [...]

Pola X (The Cornfield #39)

A 2000 Film.com review. The film’s female lead, Yekaterina Golubyova, died a few days ago, which means both of the leading actors died young. I refer to the explicit sex scene (actually explicit, not “explicit” the way some reviewers toss around the term), although it seems a body double was used for Golubyova, so there you go [...]

Beau Travail (The Cornfield #38)

It’s one of those films with a final scene that unlocks the rest of the picture. So, some notes working backwards from that. –Claire Denis departs from the general plot of her inspiration, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, in the final section of her film: no military trial or issues of the law. To the extent that Beau Travail [...]

It All Starts Today (The Cornfield #37)

From the Sep.-Oct. 2000 issue of Film Comment. A postscript to last week’s reprint of a Tavernier piece. At the age at which directors are supposed to have settled into stateliness and comfortable shoes, Bertrand Tavernier keeps kicking against propriety. Though capable of working in a classical mode, Tavernier has spent much of the Nineties [...]

Slacker

This movie is enjoying its official 20-year anniversary, so I thought I’d reprint an article I wrote about it, “Stranger Than Texas,” which appeared in Film Comment’s July-August 1990 issue. Yes—1990: 21years ago. Here’s how that happened: I saw Slacker at a 10 a.m. screening at the Seattle International Film Festival in May ’90, drawn by a catalog [...]

The Tree of Life (The Cornfield #33)

Somewhere in Andrei Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time, the Russian director approvingly quotes an anecdote about Picasso responding to an interviewer’s question by offering a definitive statement of self-possession. The questioner asks about an artist’s “search,” to which Picasso snaps, “I don’t seek. I find.” Terrence Malick would have to be categorized among the searchers. It’s [...]

Writing about Lars Von Trier (The Cornfield #29)

Lars von Trier got himself in trouble last week with comments he made after the Cannes Film Festival screening of his latest, Melancholia. In a parallel story, the world proved that it no longer had the ability to recognize a joke when it heard one. Jesus Christ, people. I’m not sure which was more absurd, [...]