[Photograph by RAY SKWIRE] ASSOCIATED PRESS: Spielberg was inspired by his 1993 Holocaust epic “Schindler’s List” to establish the Shoah Foundation, which gathers video testimonials from Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses to use as teaching tools for current and future generations. Shoah is the Hebrew word for Holocaust. Today, the foundation’s Visual History Archive is one of the world’s largest video libraries, with nearly 52,000 testimonials from 56 countries and in 32 languages. Its goal is to provide the videos to scholars and educators as a way of educating young people about the suffering caused by xenophobia around the world. Roberts, […]
CINEMA: Hammer Of The Gods
THOR (2011, directed by Kenneth Branaugh, 114 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC It’s the unofficial kick-off of the summer blockbuster season when it seems that a Marvel super hero epic arrives as dependably as Spring allergies. At this point the Marvel franchise can’t pretend to be a product of inspiration; Marvel characters are being forged into films like widgets on an assembly line. Past botched entries like Wolverine and Daredevil have kept expectations low, so it is a pleasant surprise to discover that the latest, featuring the intergalactic Norse God Thor, has been hammered into a pretty […]
PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A MIDDLE-AGED MAN: A Q&A With Dan Clowes, Cartoonist Extraordinaire
BY JONATHAN VALANIA Daniel Clowes’ 30-plus-year career as a cartoonist/graphic novelist/screenwriter has seen some remarkable reversals of fortune. Back in the mid-80s, when Clowes was fresh out of Pratt and looking to take the graphic design/illustration world by storm, he couldn’t get art directors to return his phone calls. These days, post-Ghost World, the New Yorker and The New York Times plead with him to return their calls. When not busy cranking out darkly hilarious comic works like Eightball, Dan Pussey and David Boring, or illustrating Ramones videos and Supersuckers album covers, or working with Coke to create the infamous […]
INFINITE JEST: You Are Missing Almost Everything
[Artwork via BATTLEROYALEWITHCHEEZE] NPR/MONKEY SEE BLOG: The vast majority of the world’s books, music, films, television and art, you will never see. It’s just numbers. Consider books alone. Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books, which really sounds like a lot. […] Of […]
CINEMA: Elephant’s Memory
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS (2011, directed by Francis Lawrence, 122 minutes, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC If you thought a seen-it-all big city film critic was too cynical to enjoy a film adaptation of Sara Gruen ‘s Depression-era circus romance Water For Elephants, you would be mistaken. A romantic triangle between a circus owner, his star attraction wife, and an Ivy-League-drop-out turned roustabout is just the sort of old-fashioned hokum that Hollywood once did best. There was every reason to believe that movie stars Reese Witherspoon and Edward the Vampire from Twilight could bring their sizable star power to make […]
CINEMA: Blow-Up Turns 45
VANITY FAIR: Forty-five years ago, English model Jill Kennington agreed to appear in an art-house film—one that would memorably capture the energy of London’s 1960s fashion and art scenes. Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic, Blow-Up—his first English-language film—was a sensation, and earned the Italian modernist Oscar nominations for directing and writing. Today, Kennington discusses her participation in Blow-Up and the real-world London atmosphere it depicted with Philippe Garner, international head of 20th-century decorative art and design at Christie’s. With David Alan Mellor, Garner has co-written a book that analyzes and contextualizes the film: Antonioni’s Blow-Up. (Steidl). MORE ROGER EBERT: Antonioni uses […]
CINEMA: But How Was The Play, Mrs. Lincoln?
THE CONSPIRATOR (2010, directed by Robert Redford, 123 minutes, U.S.) IN A BETTER WORLD (2010, directed by Susanne Bier, 113 minutes, Denmark) POTICHE (2010, directed by Francois Ozon, 103 minutes, France) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Even though he never appears on-screen, it’s hard not to think about The Conspirator‘s director, Robert Redford, while his new film unspools. Besides playing nothing but earnest, handsome heroes in his career, he is admired by many for his Liberal activism and founding of the Sundance Film Festival, a festival lauded for its support of independent film. Yes, the man’s philanthropy and good intentions […]
CINEMA: The Horror, The Horror
The Ward (2010, directed by John Carpenter, 88 minutes,, U.S.) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC John Carpenter, director of such genre classics as Halloween, Escape from New York, and the soon-to-be revamped The Thing, is the big guest at this year’s Cinefest. He’ll be receiving the Phantasmagoria Award at an event Monday night at the Troc, where he’ll be interviewed via Skype along with a screening of his 1986 cult favorite Big Trouble in Little China. Carpenter’s films aren’t strongly driven by any auteurist obsessions but he has directed a long run of genre films full of intelligence and original […]
CINEMA: You Only Live Twice
SOURCE CODE (2011, directed by Duncan Jones, 93 minutes, U.S.) CERTIFIED COPY (2010, directed by Abbas Kiarostami, 106 minutes, France/Italy) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC I thought I knew who Duncan Jones was. His biography fit the story so well, of course the son of David Bowie, once known as “Zowie Bowie,” would reveal himself to be a science fiction director distracted by ideas of identity, much like his father who so famously shifted between personas. His 2009 debut Moon, was the quintessential “promising debut;” a low-budget throwback to a science fiction of ideas and not mere spectacle, telling the […]
CINEMA: Let It Rainn
SALON: Gunn has described “Super” as an adaptation of William James’ “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” complete with superhero costumes and comic violence, and he’s not kidding about that nearly as much as you’d think. Another way of translating it might be to say that Gunn has taken the loser-hipster characters from “Ghost World” and transported them into the splatterific, grade-C genre universe of Troma Films. “Super” stars Rainn Wilson (best known as Dwight from TV’s “The Office”) as Frank, a hapless fry cook in some nameless, R. Crumb-style Middle American city. […] [A] divine intervention leads Frank to buy […]
CINEMA: Calling All Monsters
GARGOYLES (1972, directed by Bill L. Norton, 72 minutes, U.S) THE INCUBUS (1982, directed by John Hough, 93 minutes, Canada) BY DAN BUSKIRK FILM CRITIC Philly film buffs often note that the most intriguing films only stay in local theaters for a week, but some of the most curious offerings will only play one show. Tonight is likely your only chance to see one of the most daring bookings the Exhumed Films collective has ever presented. Loosely connected by the ancient myth of The Incubus, a demon who rapes humans as they sleep, Exhumed Film will be presenting a double-bill […]
CINEMA: Dark Side Of The Sailor Moon
SALON: This movie is going to be vehemently attacked as brain-damaged garbage that exemplifies everything that’s wrong with today’s filmmaking and today’s audiences. It’s also going to be vigorously defended as a subversive action-movie masterpiece that offers a big middle finger to Hollywood convention, audience expectations, and anybody and everybody who would rather watch “The King’s Speech.” People on both sides will be partly right and partly wrong. Here’s where I come down: “Sucker Punch” doesn’t all work by a long shot, but it confirms my sense that Snyder belongs near the top of a very short list of directors […]
CINEMA: Live From The Mars Hotel
The critically acclaimed cinematic concert rockumentary, The Grateful Dead Movie Event will take audiences back to the ‘70s for a one-night in-theater event on Wednesday, April 20 at 7:30 p.m. at the Riverview and University City 6. Under the direction of the band’s lead guitarist Jerry Garcia and co-directed by Leon Gast, these legendary 1974 concerts capture the Grateful Dead at the pinnacle of their psychedelic worldwide fame while documenting the Dead Head experience. During this NCM Fathom event, theater audiences will be the first to see exclusive, never-before-seen interviews with both Garcia and Bob Weir that were captured during […]