Author: kenmorefield

  • 2008 Top 10, Reviews, Top 10s and Other Lists

    Séraphine (Provost, 2008)

    I can immediately think of two primary types of artist biopics. The first is largely dependent on dramatic irony. You know (and really, the film knows) that Will is going to grow up to be Shakespeare or Ms. Austen is going to become Jane, and so every event is infused with significance. These films appeal to the vanity of the informed viewer. (I’m not saying that is all they do or that they are all necessarily bad for doing so.) Because I know who John Webster is, I take delight in the joke that is unexplained. Because I’m familiar with the plays or paintings or novels, I am instinctively a half second ahead of the reveal and feel smart. And make no mistake, people who watch movies like to feel smart; even if they know they are being pandered to on some levels.

  • Reviews

    Supermen of Malegaon (Khan, 2009)

    When dealing with documentaries of one place (in this case Malegaon, India) for the viewing consumption of another (in this case, America), I tend to think there are two basic categories: those films that emphasize the ways in which once we get beyond the surface differences of culture humans are all the same, and those films that emphasize the otherness of the foreign (to the viewer) culture and the people who occupy it.

  • Interviews, Reviews

    Peter Brook

    The question that has preoccupied me since screening Peter Brook’s The Lord of the Flies is whether or not I would have recognized it as an important or excellent film without the Criterion Collection label on and treatment of the DVD.

  • Art & Copy (Pray, 2009)

    Doug Pray’s documentary about the rise of the advertising age, replete with interviews from industry giants and snippets from the greatest television ads of all time, was a real festival crowd pleaser.

  • Essays, Reviews

    The Servant (Losey, 1963)

    If you enter the terms "servant," "losey," and "creepy" into the Google search engine, you get approximately nine hundred hits. Not all of them, of course, are using the "c" word in connection to Joseph Losey's 1963 film starring Dirk Bogarde and "introducing" James Fox, but enough of them are to make it clear that "creepy" is the adjective of choice for talking vaguely about Losey's film without having to get too specific.

  • Essays, Interviews

    Claude Chabrol

    Claude Chabrol, who is still alive and still working, has seventy-one directorial film credits listed at IMDB.com. By means of comparison, Michelangelo Antonioni has thirty-six, Robert Bresson seventeen, and Peter Brook a mere baker's dozen.