Smart Words About Cinema
[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976] Uniformed marching bands with twirlers. Red, white, and blue. Frustrated chauffeurs who can’t quite comprehend the world of their passengers. An arrival at the airport by charter plane, covered by an on-the-spot news announcer. The death and funeral of someone named Green(e). A reference to car racing. [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 58-59, August 1978] 1969: That Cold Day in the Park: Lazslo Kovacs’s camera bridges one sequence to another with frequent use of focus-in/blur-out visuals, stylistically underscoring the film’s dual theme: the ambiguity and the dissolution of personality. It’s a film whose greatest strength lies in its atmosphere. Altman’s and Kovacs’s [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 66-67, March 1981] Time flies. The six-year-old brat in quest of an intergalactic bushbaby in 2001 is now all grown up and directing her own documentary film about what is only the third movie her father has directed since that 1968 masterwork. Televised by the BBC at a length of [...]