making & checking resolutions • Obama's inauguration • first coverage of The Wind in the Willows • mumblecore • Wonders in the Dark • favorite characters • Reading the Movies meme • The Examiner • summer of big screen classics • new releases from 2008/2009 • Luchino Visconti • my first video essay • my first interview • The Sun's New Yellow (new blog for casual posting) • Best of the 21st Century? (early version) • news stories • contemporary independent cinema
Chapter 4: Restless Hibernation (January - March 2009)
JANUARY
Plans for 2009 - many of which would change, of course
How Charlie Brown celebrates Christmas, twenty-five years apart - and what this says about the evolution of entertainment, Peanuts, and Charles Schulz personally
Through the darkness of future past, the cyborg longs to kill...
Resolutions for the new year (I followed up twelve months later to see how I'd done)
I took an overnight bus to D.C. to witness history, and wrote about the presidential inauguration the following day
Reviewing Jean-Luc Godard for the first time on my site, discussing one of his first forays into politics (and of course, the beginning of his collaboration with Anna Karina)
An obscure puzzle using YouTube clips: the first hint of what would become one of my most extensively-covered subjects
Tribute to John Updike after he passed away
FEBRUARY
Of all the Busby Berkeley films, this one might work the best as a standalone comedy (not that you'd want to lose the musical numbers)
Answering my YT puzzle from earlier - those were all clips of actors from the Rankin-Bass Wind in the Willows cartoon
Status update after several slow weeks
Reviewing the Rankin-Bass adaptation from a VHS tape recorded off ABC when I was little kid
I finally recorded my thoughts on Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut long after watching it
Sharing an essay written in 2005 about two oft-ignored but absolutely key chapters of The Wind in the Willows
MARCH
Kicking off a faster pace with this French children's classic
A list of twenty favorite actors, with some clips scattered throughout
Two all-time favorite rock performance docs, in very different styles - The Who vs. Talking Heads, many shows vs. one concert
Capsule on the newly-minted Best Picture winner
Capsules on Valkyrie, Taken, and The Spirit - the last is only two lines long (I felt that was generous)
Gordon Willis' cinematography goes a long way toward convincing us this footage is the real artifact
Several months after reviewing 2046, I circled back to its predecessor
Transcribing the amazing history of an amazing film (from text presented as a slide show on the disc)
Highlights from the winter of 2009
Links to a couple great Wind in the Willows essays I found online
Vincente Minnelli's trashier, international re-invention of The Bad and the Beautiful?
Childhood, adolescence, and youth against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War
A collection of Lynch's (mostly) early work - the last time I reviewed his films for half a decade
Over a decade before Snow White, Lotte Reiniger made a dazzling animated feature
My attempt to kick off a second leg of my director series didn't go very far but did yield a couple reviews of interesting DeMille silents
Re-visited this film a dozen years after it's release and...wow, was it a stinker
My first foray into mumblecore
A look at everyday life, broadcast over the gulf of a lifetime
My last DeMille for the soon-to-be-abandonded director series
Before echoing Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma echoed Jean-Luc Godard
In my exploration of zeroes lo-fi I was REALLY taken with this one, not just a curio but a truly great film (capsules of all the other mumblecore I watched that spring were featured in the comments section below)
Highlights of March 2009, the last time I would present a monthly round-up
Chapter 5: Covers, Characters, and Wonders (April - June 2009)
Read about this chapter
Read about this chapter
APRIL
Shifting gears as I contemplate a more measured approach
I was struck by the amusing descriptions of King Lear in a Jean-Luc Godard bio
Forty of my favorite characters
Transcribing an essay by Francois Truffaut
MAY
Updating my Astaire-Rogers dance collection
One of my favorite movie books when I was growing up, illustrated with scans of its bold, colorful pages
This was definitely my signature post in 2009 - a collection of movie books that influenced me as a child, teenager, and young adult, with an invitation for other movie bloggers to join
JUNE
Transcribing three essays by Francois Truffaut, on Citizen Kane, Muriel, and Roberto Rossellini
Chapter 6: Examining the Options (June - October 2009)
Read about this chapter
Read about this chapter
My first piece written for another site, diving into Spike Lee's 9/11-conscious film for the "Counting Down the Zeroes" series
Covering a "widescreen" series at a local theater for the Examiner site, I started with Sam Peckinpah's classic western
Reflections on the King of Pop after his death
JULY
The summer classic film retrospective continues with this MGM super-production on the big screen
Gathering all the personally influential movie books chosen by dozens of bloggers in response to my own round-up
Francis Ford Coppola's grand folly speaks to the myths of both Vietnam and New Hollywood
Low-key study of Red Sox pitcher Luis Tiant - the multiplex had a warning on the desk for customers who were angry they'd bought tickets to a documentary
The sci-fi classic plays like four films in one
Celebrating my site's first anniversary in a directory, with much to gather but so much more on the horizon
Reporting on a live appearance by a former member of the Weather Underground
.png){kind=small}
Not just a landscape film but a psychological portrait drawn through the use of space and a subtle narrative/aesthetic structure
I wasn't particularly charmed by the winking stylization of this romantic comedy (although I ended up liking it more on a rewatch a couple years later)
AUGUST
Getting to see Akira Kurosawa's crowdpleaser on the big screen, I loved it
Steven Spielberg's big breakthrough is half Alfred Hitchcock, half Howard Hawks
Luchino Visconti bids farewell to the age of aristocrats
.jpg){kind=small}
A million miles from Rocco's milieu, the decadent indulgence of late Visconti
This incredible film completely took me by surprise when I caught it at a small offshoot of a small festival on a Sunday morning
Who knew that an HBO Peter Sellers biopic would be among the best, nastiest portraits of the zeroes zeitgeist?
SEPTEMBER
Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg pair as directors as well as actors for an awkward outing (often if not always appealingly so)
What various directors had in store for the autumn of '09
My first video essay, fusing Scarface, Carrie, and Hi, Mom!; still one of my favorites, it got a bit lost in the shuffle at this time
A documentary about film criticism mourns the dying of the light
When Polanski was briefly captured by Swiss officials, I reviewed this documentary about his crime, case, and persona
Re-living the celebrity-studded fairy tale series I loved as a child, with the aid of an old video promo
OCTOBER
The German left-wing terrorist group re-imagined three decades later
Musings about change on the horizon for the medium and industry
My very short-lived double daily review format begins with neo-neorealism in the outer boroughs
Pool full of liquor then you dive in it...
Dante-esque journey into the bowels of the Romanian health care system (maybe that's why some dubbed it a "Comedy")
Sergei Eisenstein's flamboyant two-part biopic is a trip
Andrew Bujalski's follow-up to Funny Ha Ha brings a similar style to black-and-white Brooklyn instead of color Cambridge
Quick take on the Fellini classic, standing at the crossroads of different sixties
Sibling rivalry and ideological conflict between a communist and a fascist
Chapter 7: Open Season for Blogging (November - December 2009)
Read about this chapter
Read about this chapter
NOVEMBER
Introducing a new blog, The Sun's Not Yellow, for more frequent, spontaneous takes
Sharing an amusing excerpt from David Copperfield
The most popular toon characters of the late eighties teach a teen the dangers of pot
Finally catching up with WALL-E a year after its release
The emotional pull of family films
My first Mikio Naruse, a bittersweet portrait of stoicism and grace
My thoughts on the one-year anniversary of the president's election
Writing about Boston film events for the Examiner, I previewed this festival
Luis Bunuel's proto- (and reverse-) Discreet Charm...the guests can eat, they just can't leave
Celebrating Beatles music videos - though all the clips are gone now!
Taking issue with the coverage of a shooting on a military base
Announcing upcoming work (although Ballast, featured in the picture, would actually go up later)
Transcript of Brakhage's narration for one of his seventies films
My first interview, with Gerald Peary, a critic who made a documentary about criticism
I was still fairly centrist in 2009 but even then I was highly suspicious of the U.S. line on Venezuela
Kicking off the first leg of my Best of the 21st Century? series reviewing acclaimed zeroes cinema I hadn't seen before
Halloween in November: Universal horror classic #1...
Planning for the week ahead with reviews of comedy, drama, and magical realism
My Best of the 21st Century? series begins with a mellow film containing subtle dualities
Elliptical and enigmatic, this quiet movie was shot in the Mississippi delta
For Thanksgiving, I highlighted two essays, on Il Posto and Day of Wrath, by the great critics Kent Jones and Jonathan Rosenbaum
Teasing some upcoming reviews for the Examiner, including two documentaries and an action comedy
1001 Films You Must See Before You Die, you say? Can't wait to read their take on the most acclaimed film of the 21st century. Now to take a big sip of coffee, and flip to the back of the book...
Documenting the Twin Towers in a peaceful, if poignant, context
DECEMBER
Is Bruges a shithole?
Teasing upcoming reviews of three non-American but English-language films (well, maybe three and a half)
Nostalgia turns to tragedy in the mid-eighties UK
I was the only person in the theater for this one which was both unnerving and maybe less uncomfortable than the alternative
Distillation of Werner Herzog's bitter view of nature, through someone else's lens
Novel stylistic/storytelling approach didn't quite work for me
Pursuing many classics I'd never seen before - though as it turns out, I wouldn't write about most of them
Steven Soderbergh captures the rancid polish of late zeroes America so well it makes the film itself nearly unbearable
A short reflection from nineteen-year-old me (pulled from the archive when I needed something to re-post in '09)
Another excerpt from the same lengthy Woody Allen essay
At the end of 2009, I looked back on my resolutions for the site from January - how did I do?
I was enchanted by the dreamy texture of my first Apichatpong Weerasethakul film
Marking the holiday with a French family drama/comedy (and though this wasn't the plan, wrapping up my first approach to Best of the 21st Century?)
Preparing to look back at the past year in online film coverage
New Year's salutations from The Dancing Image
(I covered this year on Episodes 4, 5, 6 and 7 of my Patreon podcast)
No comments:
Post a Comment