KINO OBSCURA

GREAT SCENESMr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory...

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:31:00 -0800

GREAT SCENES
Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory (William Heise/James White, 1897)

Born today — February 11: American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, whose 1,093 credited patents include the kinetoscope, the first fully functional motion picture camera.

By 1893, construction was complete on the world first film production studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey. Here, cinematographers captured Edison at work in a mock staging of his actual chemical laboratory.

For Edison, who often employed ruthless tactics to advance his inventions — including bribing a theater owner in London for a copy of Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, then showing the film in New York City without compensating Méliès — the arrival of sound in motion pictures “spoiled everything.” In an interview with Reader’s Digest in March 1930, he cited D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation as his favorite film.

Art & Film: Hopper/Malick

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:35:00 -0800

From the canvas to the cinema.

David Liu | 21 January 2012

House by the Railroad (Edward Hopper, 1925; oil on canvas)

Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978)

The year is 1916. Bill, Abby and Linda ride the rails from Chicago to the Texas Panhandle, where they work as farmhands on the wheat harvest. Looming over the spacious fields, the farmer’s Victorian mansion evokes both grandeur and solitude. Like Hopper, Malick frames his edifice as an indelible yet impenetrable monument of American enterprise.

Notes on Evolution: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 11:00:00 -0800

David Liu | 31 December 2011

From Zodiac’s restless journalists and detectives to Seven’s ruthless killer, from Edward Norton’s white-collar waif in Fight Club to the troubled young entrepreneurs of The Social Network, the heroes and antiheroes of David Fincher’s films are forces of nature, obsessive and meticulous to a fault. Their hunger for progression and distaste for established norms reflect common psychological impulses connecting the director’s body of work.

It’s no stretch to say that Fincher revisits familiar territory with his latest The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The film begins by giving us snapshots of the physically scarred, emotionally neutered Lisbeth Salander, played brilliantly by Rooney Mara. As her relationship with journalist Mikael Blomkvist develops, Salander evolves into a fascinating contradiction — alternating between cool detachment and feral intensity, she comes to embody both spectrums of the “Fincherian” archetype.

The more of Fincher’s films we experience (and experience again), the more they seem to share the same dialectical universe. Every line of dialogue, gesture and expression springs from an unconsummated desire for fulfillment, fragments of colossal puzzles that straddle the divide between revelation and oblivion.

Hip-Hop & Film: Art of the Sample

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 09:00:00 -0800

Throughout the years, feature film scores have provided rich sources of cross-genre experimentation for hip-hop artists.

David Liu | 27 December 2011

Song: “Blueprint²” by Jay-Z
Sample: “The Ecstasy of Gold” by Ennio Morricone
Film: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

Producer Charlemagne preserves the grandeur of Morricone’s iconic opening piano riff and ensuing operatic sweep. (See also: samples by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony on their 2007 track “We Workin’” and by David Fincher for an NFL commercial starring LaDainian Tomlinson and Troy Polamalu.)

Song: “Burnt Offering“ by Blue Scholars
Sample: “Moon River” by Henry Mancini & Johnny Mercer
Film: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961)

The Seattle-based duo of Prometheus Brown and Sabzi are self-professed cinephiles, and their jazz-tinged re-interpretation of the Mancini classic resonates with cosmopolitan refinement.

Song: “RoboCop” by Kanye West
Sample: “Kissing in the Rain” by Patrick Doyle
Film: Great Expectations (Alfonso Cuarón, 1998)

After skillfully juxtaposing string instruments with rap vocals on 2005’s “Gone,” West pushed the envelope further with this lush, angst-ridden arrangement of Doyle’s score.

Song: “It’s Mine” by Mobb Deep & Nas
Sample: “Tony’s Theme” by Giorgio Moroder
Film: Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983)

Larger than life: Queensbridge’s most illustrious products join forces over a prominent instrumental tribute to one of cinema’s most celebrated underworld figures.

Song: “Dance with the Devil” by Immortal Technique
Sample: “(Where Do I Begin?) Love Story” by Francis Lai
Film: Love Story (Arthur Hiller, 1970)

Drenched in irony, Technique’s 10-minute tale of a young would-be gang member’s vanishing illusions elevates its melancholy source material to unsettling heights.

GREAT SCENESA Better Tomorrow / 英雄本色 (John Woo, 1986) In a...

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 23:59:00 -0800

GREAT SCENES
A Better Tomorrow / 英雄本色 (John Woo, 1986)

In a spirited homage to Johnny Boy’s entrance in Mean Streets, Mark Gor (Chow Yun-fat) sashays his way into a restaurant before a shootout.

With A Better Tomorrow, Woo ignited the “heroic bloodshed” genre of Hong Kong action cinema, combining operatic montage sequences, charismatic criminals as protagonists and recurring themes of redemption and chivalry.

Closing Shots: David Fincher

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 17:02:00 -0800

A collection of final shots from the works of David Fincher.

David Liu | 18 December 2011

Seven (1995)

“The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for,” narrates Detective Lt. William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) in a world-weary voice, quoting from Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, before adding: “I agree with the second part.” David Bowie’s “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” surfaces after the fade to black.

The Game (1997)

You can never be sure anymore. After reaching an uncertain catharsis in the form of a impromptu dinner date, Nicholas Van Orton — cinema’s contemporary Ebenezer Scrooge — looks left and right in weary bemusement. Fincher cuts out to a wide shot of the nighttime San Francisco locale, and Jefferson Airplane’s haunting “White Rabbit” creeps into the final credits.

Fight Club (1999)

In the heat of the moment, the Narrator (Edward Norton) grabs the bewildered Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) by the hand. “You met me at a very strange time in my life,” he says, as glittering monoliths of consumer culture crumble to the opening chords of The Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”

Zodiac (2007)

“The last time I saw this face was July 4th, 1969. I am very sure that’s the man who shot me.” A haunted survivor affirms the implausible, wrapping up Fincher’s monumental chronicle of fears and obsessions at the dawn of the Information Age. The use of Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” both here and in the film’s opening sequence, echoes with sinister vitality.

The Social Network (2010)

Dead silence is punctuated only by The Beatles’s “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” and the sound of fingers typing on a keyboard. A close-up of Mark Zuckerberg’s face confirms his evolution from obscure wunderkind to lonely sovereign of a virtual empire.

GREAT SCENESLate Spring (Yasujiro Ozu,...

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 03:26:00 -0800

GREAT SCENES
Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

“That’s the order of human life and history: to expect such immediate happiness is a mistake. Happiness isn’t something you wait around for. It’s something you create yourself. Happiness comes only through effort.”

—

Born today — 12 December: Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (小津安二郎), who, despite never marrying, captured gentle, profound portraits of families through the lens of marriage, death and generational differences in postwar Japan.

After a protracted battle with cancer, Ozu passed away in his hometown of Tokyo on his birthday in 1963. He was 60.

Ozu’s signature style — static visual compositions and austere, contemplative frames — has gone on to influence a generation of contemporary filmmakers, among them Jia Zhangke, Mike Leigh, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang and Wim Wenders, who once called Ozu his “only master.”

Age of Turbulence

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 02:22:00 -0800

Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins

David Liu | 9 December 2011

Call it a requiem for the Age of the Samurai — Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins opens with a disgraced man committing a public act of seppuku and ends with a lone samurai walking off-screen in the aftermath of a violent showdown, navigating his way through an irreversible swath of ruin.

Set in the turbulent years of 1840s Japan, the film begins by dividing its time between two narratives. We witness firsthand the repulsive sadism of Lord Naritsugu (Goro Inagaki) and his ruthless determination to hold onto power in the waning years of the shogunate government, and then follow veteran samurai Shinzaemon (Koji Yakusho) as he assembles a team of courageous men on a mission to assassinate Naritsugu.

The parties converge in the form of a bravura battle sequence sustained over the film’s final 45 minutes, in which the samurai — relentless guardians of a dying way of life — clash in breathtaking fashion with Naritsugu’s corrupt legions. In its exquisite recreation of a lost world, Miike’s strongest picture to date attains poignant, magisterial dimensions.

Distant Voices, Still Lives

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:00:00 -0800

Globalization and modernity in Jia Zhangke’s The World (世界)

David Liu | 22 November 2011

The deepest problems of modern life flow from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of the historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life.

— Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903)

In light of China’s fragmented progression through periods of reform and renovation, the idea of “modern life” shares intricate connections with urban progress and the struggle to separate culture from consumerism. A similar fine line distinguishes the so-called Fifth Generation of filmmakers from the enfants terrible of the Sixth Generation, two cinematic movements symbolically connected by the events in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989.

Whereas the first group channeled the spirit of China’s rural roots by mourning and mythologizing the past in human dramas such as Xie Jin’s Hibiscus Town (1986) and Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987), the second group shifted its focus to the vicissitudes of urban life in modern China through films like Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Days (1993) and Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000). Made without bureaucratic consent, the latters’ critical success in foreign festival circuits signaled a shift that was, in many ways, prophetic. The rapid evolution of China’s modern metropolises would inevitably arrive hand in hand with globalization in irreversible fashion.

After helming a series of underground features that put him on the world cinema map in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke was greenlighted in 2004 by the Chinese government to make The World, a story of twenty-somethings navigating their daily lives as employees of Beijing’s World Park.

The film is both an antithesis and summation of Jia’s previous works, which were neorealist meditations on the effects of socioeconomic progress on the dusty rural townships of inland Shanxi province. Platform (2000) documented a decade of reform spanning the 1980s through the eyes of a performing troupe, Pickpocket (1996) and Unknown Pleasures (2002) criticized the spiritual malaise caused by that progress by following the lives of disaffected small-town youth. By contrast, The World plays like an allegory of globalization seen through another group — the alienation of individuals working in Beijing with roots elsewhere in China.

Opening scenes in films often function as seductions or promises, inviting us into a world of thespians projecting humanity into fictional personalities; in The World, a world within a world, the lead characters take their names from the actors themselves. The film opens with Xiao Tao (played by Jia regular Zhao Tao), dressed in Bollywood dancer garb and yelling loudly for a band-aid. In an extended take lasting over three minutes, Jia’s camera tracks her walking through the corridors of a backstage performance center, illuminating a scene of chaos and madness that inches close to urban modernity through her perception.

Brimming with natural dialogue and environmental noise, the sequence’s evocation of the quotidian is uncanny; like the long takes that feature prominently in all of Jia’s works, they represent pure filmic attempts at capturing life in real time. Near the end of the credits sequence, the film cuts to a shot of an artificial city skyline, followed by another cut to a wide-angle shot of a theater audience. The implication here is the staging of urban progress, and in one cinematic flourish, Jia displays an emphasis on modernity affecting the “now,” instead of the documentation of progress stemming from the “then.”

By setting The World in Beijing’s World Park, Jia ensures that the narrative irony becomes immediately apparent. “See the world without ever leaving Beijing,” an on-screen motto proclaims, as tourists and employees ride camels through the Pyramids of Giza, patrol on white horses through Roman ruins and take the elevator up the Eiffel Tower for sprawling panoramas of Beijing. The existence of such images in Jia’s film immediately creates the impression of artificiality, and also one of ironic cosmopolitan unity — Asia’s preeminent emerging superpower taking revered world landmarks and placing underwhelming replicas of them in the heart of its national capital.

This atmosphere of artificiality that pervades the film also lends it its methodical quality, as Jia establishes both a yearning for and a conscious escape from real life that forms the motives of the film’s characters. The film’s subtle partition into narratives — one of which features a well-placed series of animated sequences — is backed by titles like “Paris in the Beijing Suburb,” “Ulan Batoor Nights” and “Tokyo Story,” surfacing like products of the characters’ conscious attempts at ameliorating their own emptiness by seeking comfort in the far-away promise of another fabled world city.

To the extent that the film’s artificial microcosm creates these psychological conditions — fleeting shots of empty park trams and elevators, stagnant long takes of alienated couples standing under replicas of the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe — it creates a deep contrast with what Simmel described over a century ago as “the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence.”

The film’s protagonists, Taisheng and Xiao Tao, both hark from the rural inland abode of Shanxi, relocating to Beijing for the promises offered by a life in the city. When Taisheng’s old hometown friend visits him, he takes him on an informal tour of the park, pointing proudly at a replica of Manhattan over a large pond: “Look, The Twin Towers were bombed on September 11, but we still have them,” to which his friend nods admiringly. Here, Jia takes the supposedly edifying nature of the park — to enlighten a new generation of Chinese urban citizens on what the “world” supposedly looks like — and reproduces it as a detachment from the real world, an abstraction of time and space that borders on surrealism.

By weaving a tale about the frailty of life, relationships and human communication in an urban setting, Jia offers a simulacrum of contemporary China in The World — a character piece that doubles as a caustic condemnation of globalization and its dehumanizing effect on Chinese denizens. Some three decades separated from a Cultural Revolution that sputtered in its ambitious excess, Jia’s film suggests a capitalist revolution that is destined for the same ends.

After spending the entire film crystallizing the trials and tribulations of his characters, Jia ends The World with a denouement that refutes narrative logic; the freeze between the film’s two lovers transforms into a literal reality. The film cuts to black and we hear Tao and Taisheng whisper to each other, capturing the moral ambiguity of China’s new generation through concise, despairing final words.

Taisheng: Are we dead?
Xiao Tao: No. This is just the beginning.

Happy birthday, Martin Scorsese

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:52:00 -0800

The illustrious American filmmaker turns 69 today.

David Liu | 17 November 2011

“Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.”
— Martin Scorsese

Of Time and the City: Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and the September 11 Attacks

Fifteen months after the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, New York City was reborn in glorious fashion on celluloid.

When Gangs of New York opened in the December of 2002, Scorsese’s violent dramatization of mid-19th century ethnic tensions in New York’s Five Points district not only captured the operatic allure of a bygone era, but also conveyed a veteran filmmaker’s resolute manifesto of hope for a city constantly regenerating itself amid the tumultuous ebb and flow of history.

Thanksgiving: Food, Film, Scorsese

Few filmmakers know the value of a good meal better than Martin Scorsese, and we cinephiles are thankful for it.

Whether it’s entering the club through the kitchen, attending an ornate underworld banquet or stopping by Momma’s for a casual dinner, food sequences abound in Goodfellas (1990).

Scorsese’s Shutter Island Forays Into Fear

Emerging from the mist like a specter of past grievances, Scorsese’s latest is a beautiful absurdity — a 138-minute descent into the subconscious of an American master.

Gruesome memories of World War II resurface; a deceased love beckons; past and present collide in a series of macabre dream sequences. Tapping into his vast directorial arsenal, Scorsese builds the film to a fever pitch through a masterful array of cuts, extended takes, frenzied close-ups and ominous long shots.

Great Scenes: Raging Bull (1980)

Jake La Motta’s victories outside the ring unfold as precious color mementos, set to the elegiac strains of “Silvano: Barcarolle” by Pietro Mascagni.

Great Scenes: The Age of Innocence (1993)

“He had heard her name often enough during the year and a half since they last met, and was even familiar with the main incidents of her life. But he heard all these accounts with detachment, as if listening to reminiscences of someone long dead. Yet the past had come again into the present, as in those newly discovered caverns in Tuscany, where children had lit bunches of straw and seen old images staring from the wall.”

“Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.”
— Martin Scorsese

Art & Film: Van Gogh/Kurosawa

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 21:23:00 -0700

From the canvas to the cinema.

David Liu | 22 October 2011

The Langlois Bridge at Arles with Women Washing (Vincent van Gogh, 1888; watercolor)

Wheatfield with Crows (Vincent van Gogh, 1890; oil on canvas)

—

Dreams (Akira Kurosawa, 1990)

In Kurosawa’s third-to-last film, a collection of vignettes based on actual dreams of the Japanese director, magical realism becomes inseparable from the realms of art and human history. The segment titled “Crows” follows an art student wearing Kurosawa’s trademark hat — credited only as “I” — who finds himself entering the vivid world of Vincent van Gogh through an exhibit of the Dutch master’s paintings.

Nightcall - Kavinsky & Lovefoxxx Drive (Nicolas Winding...

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 02:34:00 -0700

Nightcall - Kavinsky & Lovefoxxx

Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn, 2011)

From the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City-like opening credits to the Grimm’s fairytale premise, Drive unfolds as a hypnotic union of tradition and modernism. Gosling’s Driver is a veritable Man with No Name; through his vigilant eyes (and Refn’s idiosyncratic vision, recalling Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust), the solitude of nighttime Los Angeles attains haunting, mythic proportions.

All Quiet on the Eastern Front

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 02:27:00 -0700

With the monumental City of Life and Death, Lu Chuan crafts an affecting canvas of wartime brutality

David Liu | 22 September 2011

Shells fly, walls crumble and bodies fall in the first 25 minutes of City of Life and Death, Lu Chuan’s monumental account of the Japanese occupation of Nanjing in 1937. Shot in stately chiaroscuro, the sequence recalls the scope of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica: Chaos reigns as a once-proud national capital falls victim to the vagaries of war. Whirling in and out of ruined buildings, Lu’s wide-angle compositions capture Nanjing in its final hours of resistance with uncompromising veracity.

What ensues is a film that confronts the darkest depths of the human condition. After quelling the final regiments of Chinese freedom fighters, the Japanese soldiers engage in a six-week period of wanton debauchery that would take hundreds of thousands of lives. Civilians are ordered to dig their own graves, women are enlisted into makeshift brothels and pleas for peace fall on deaf ears.

It’s a descent into madness painstakingly orchestrated by writer-director Lu, whose previous two films — 2002’s darkly comedic The Missing Gun, 2004’s sparse, ruminative Kekexili: Mountain Patrol — have established him as one of China’s most versatile contemporary auteurs.

Of Time and the City

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 22:30:00 -0700

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, New York City filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee crafted vivid tributes to a wounded metropolis.

David Liu | 8 September 2011

Fifteen months after the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, New York City was reborn in glorious fashion on celluloid.

It took a pair of feature films from two of the city’s most influential filmmakers to do it. The first, Queens native Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, framed a father-son revenge saga around immigrant life in Civil War-era New York and the 1863 draft riots. The second, Brooklyn resident Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, followed a convicted drug dealer as he navigates post-9/11 New York City before serving a seven-year prison sentence.

Set 140 years apart, the films coalesced remarkably in their portrayals of the turbulent divisions shared between the city’s past and present.

GREAT SCENESLawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) From flame to...

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 18:49:00 -0700

GREAT SCENES
Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)

From flame to eternal flame: In one of cinema’s great match cuts, the protagonist’s insatiable desire for adventure transitions directly to the allure of the desert — and Maurice Jarre’s inimitable score.

A Cinephile's Instinctive Travels: Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 03:39:00 -0700

Reliving the people and places I encounter through the sights and sounds of the films they inspired.

David Liu | 14 August 2011

The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)

For the majority of its running time, Friedkin’s picture takes place in the affluent neighborhood of the nation’s capital. After shooting a film about student protests against the Vietnam War, actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) walks down the foliage-covered stairway entrance to Georgetown University.

In a later scene, a contemplative police detective (Lee J. Cobb) ascends a flight of stairs to the MacNeil residence, intent on investigating a mysterious death.

—

On the last Friday of my summer in the District, I took from my residence toward M Street in the deadening heat. By the time I reached Georgetown, the campus was nearly empty. A slight breeze carried through the adjacent neighborhood. The distinct Flemish Romanesque arches of Healy Hall languished like a sleeping giant behind the lush green foliage surrounding the university’s entrance steps.

A few miles away, the stone staircase built atop the steep hilly terrain between M Street and Prospect Street — now dubbed the “Exorcist steps” for its infamous association with the film — sat deserted in the heat of the late afternoon.

A Cinephile's Instinctive Travels: National Mall, Washington, D.C.

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:13:00 -0700

Reliving the people and places I encounter through the sights and sounds of the films they inspired.

David Liu | 12 August 2011

Nixon (Oliver Stone, 1995)

May 9, 1970: Within days of the killing of four Kent State University students by the Ohio National Guard, popular dissent against the United States invasion of Cambodia escalated into nationwide protests. Antiwar sentiment had reached a level not seen since the end of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, and President Richard M. Nixon found himself torn between enforcing his military agenda in Southeast Asia and seeking to regain the support of the people back home.

In an anecdote confirmed by national media outlets and depicted in Oliver Stone’s film, the sleepless Nixon woke his valet, gathered several Secret Service men and paid a visit to the Lincoln Memorial an hour before dawn.

As Nixon walks slowly up the steps to the Memorial, Stone juxtaposes images from the Civil War with footage of the Vietnam conflict, intercutting both to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The moment is powerful in its frankness: An embattled wartime president gazing wistfully up at the greatest of all wartime presidents, ruminating on an elusive ideal.

Moments later, student demonstrators who had been sleeping on the steps wake up and gather around the commander-in-chief, surprised but still defiant. “Well, probably most of you think I’m a real S.O.B.,” Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) says. “I know that.”

—

As the second-to-last day of my internship wrapped up, I walked alone to the National Mall to finish the day in peaceful reflection. I arrived at the Lincoln Memorial a little past ten, only to find myself among a throng of tourists still milling around beneath the vigilant, world-weary eyes of the nation’s 16th President.

Situated at the center of the Memorial, the Lincoln statue — designed by sculptor Daniel Chester French and carved by the Piccirilli Brothers — stands 19 feet tall, weighs 170 tons and is composed of 28 blocks of white Georgia marble. It was constructed over a period of four years and unveiled in Washington, D.C. in 1922.

Directly above Lincoln’s head, a five-line epitaph reads:

IN THIS TEMPLE
AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE
FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION
THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
IS ENSHRINED FOREVER

A Cinephile's Instinctive Travels: Times Square, New York

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 22:09:00 -0700

Reliving the people and places I encounter through the sights and sounds of the films they inspired.

David Liu | 5 August 2011

Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969)

Times Square: a world of silent desperation, false hopes and fading dreams.

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

Times Square: viewed through the rear window of a taxi, a seedy, infernal pit of post-Vietnam malaise.

Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)

Times Square: a momentary smorgasbord of sights and sounds, pulsating warmly to the rhythms of George Gershwin.

I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007)

Times Square: in an alternate 2012, a military scientist finds himself the only man in Manhattan.

About a month ago, I dined with two friends at The View Lounge on the 48th floor of the Marriott Marquis. After three hours we departed, descended and spent the next few minutes walking around the immediate vicinity. It was past eleven on a Monday night, and Times Square gave off an unmistakably festive, sleepless vibe.

Art & Film: Da Vinci/Buñuel, et al.

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 23:40:00 -0700

From the canvas to the cinema.

David Liu | 31 July 2011

The Last Supper (Leonardo Da Vinci, 1495-98; tempera on gesso, pitch and mastic)

—

Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961)

A group of beggars break into Viridiana’s premises after she departs. Unable to resist the fortunes before their eyes, they transform the premises into a drunken party estate with the help of Handel’s “Messiah” — Buñuel’s attempt to rile both the Roman Catholic Church and the Fascist regime of Francisco Franco.

MASH (Robert Altman, 1970)

Depressed by his inability to get it up, “Painless Pole” Waldowski swallows a sleeping pill, believing it to be the suicide-inducing “black capsule.” Lying in a coffin, he falls asleep to the strains of “Suicide is Painless” as the rest of the crew watches.

Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009)

1947 — the Silk Spectre hangs up her costume. In the film’s phenomenal opening sequence, the Minutemen gather around to celebrate Sally Jupiter’s retirement party, as Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’” underscores the final public assembly of 1940s America’s most treasured crime fighters.

GREAT SCENESDo the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989) On this hottest...

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:38:00 -0700

GREAT SCENES
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)

On this hottest day of summer, the Eastern seaboard needs a little bit of Radio Raheem.

“The story of Right Hand, Left Hand: it’s a tale of good and evil. Hate: it was with this hand that Cain iced his brother. Love: these five fingers, they go straight to the soul of man.”