KINO OBSCURA

Prelude: The Atlas March — Reinhold Heil, Johnny Klimek, Tom Tykwer

Cloud Atlas (Andy Wachowski/Lana Wachowski/Tom Tykwer, 2012)

After multiple viewings, Cloud Atlas still strikes me as one of the most interesting cinematic failures in recent memory. There may be as much to admire about the film (its technical razzle-dazzle, its naked sentiment) as there is to lament (its hamfisted message, its problematic “post-racial” posturing) — but let us turn the page to the musical score, a deft juxtaposition of multiple narrative threads with a gorgeous progression of Western music tropes. For what it’s worth, this former middle school orchestra geek loved it.

Waltz No. 2, Suite for Variety Orchestra - Dmitri Shostakovich

Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

According to Kubrick’s brother-in-law and longtime assistant Jan Harlan, the director considered his final feature to be his “greatest contribution to the art of cinema.” Completed just days before his death, Eyes Wide Shut ranks among Kubrick’s most fascinating pictures — a dreamlike study of sexual repression at millennium’s end, and the perfect denouement to a body of work devoted to the absurdity of the human condition. 

“Observancy is a dying art. The essence of dramatic form is to let an idea come over people without it being plainly stated.”
— Stanley Kubrick (26 July 1928 - 7 March 1999)

Pavane for a Dead Princess - Maurice Ravel

The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)

With profound condolences for the victims of the Aurora, Colorado theater shootings. 

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.