msicism

Pedestrian At Best (Part One)

In my recent podcast discussion with the Great Peter Labuza (coming soon to an Internet near you), the prospect of writing about matters other than film was addressed. I mentioned how I doubted there were a gre...

Thunder Road (Jim Cummings, 2018)

I suppose in retrospect it makes sense that this was a short film first. The funeral is, indeed, a showstopping set-piece of anguished discomfort, and one could imagine it as a stand-alone work of cringy "art."...

9 Fingers (FJ Ossang, 2017)

Apart from a couple of very stylish short films, this is my first engagement with "punk" filmmaker FJ Ossang. Granted, this is his most recent film, and I have not seen the work on which the director built his ...

A Family Tour (Ying Liang, 2018)

In the midst of its scathing critique of the repressive government of the People's Republic of China, a totalitarian state that "disappears" its critics and rips families apart, A Family Tour does some...

Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2018)

Practically from the jump, there was no question that Cold War was one of the best directed and (perhaps even more to the point) best edited films I'd seen this year. From shot to shot, the fi...

not an entry on Aurora Borealis (Márta Mészáros, 2017)

I tried to watch this film, but it was a ghastly flavor of Europudding. It soon became clear that it was yet another story about (spoiler, I guess) a family with Nazi secrets hidden in its past. But the acting,...

Ash is Purest White (Jia Zhangke, 2018)

There are times when I feel a bit out of my depth with respect to a given film, and yet of course, despite this fact, I have feelings and reactions to it. At this point in my "career," virtually no film simply ...

Cinderella (Ericka Beckman, 1986)

On the web page for this film, there's a pullquote from P. Adams Sitney, who declares Beckman "the most self-confident and aggres...

Life After Love (Zachary Epcar, 2018)

The scene, as far as I can tell, is a parking lot beneath a BART station at twilight, a kind of stationary urban ark that can easily be mistaken for a ferry. The sun glints off a field of cars, their distinctiv...

An observation...

Thus far, I have 37 patrons. That's great! Thank you all so much. 

Oddly enough, that's 36 men and one woman.

I'm not sure if that says something about the current economy, about film criticism in general, or about my writing in particular, but I thought it was worth noting.

From the Notebook of... (Robert Beavers, 1971/1998)

First, a word about the double date. Many of Beavers' films have two dates of completion, because he finished shooting the footage during the first listed year, and completed the editing (or in some cases, re-e...

Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (Kazuo Hara, 1974)

This is a film I'd been meaning to see for years, and I finally got around to it, now that I am doing research for my upcoming Diary Film course. As it happens, Kazuo's film is not exactly right for the class, ...

Mirror (Robert Morris, 1969)

Among the original group of minimalists, Robert Morris was probably the closest to a bridge figure between the emerging "primary structures" movement and the slightly earlier, related but distinct school of con...

Field (Ernie Gehr, 1970)

Through the kind assistance of Mr. James Hansen, I was able to finally see one of the few classic Ernie Gehr films that had thus far eluded me, and it did not disappoint. Made in the same year as Serene Vel...