Making my way Worlds: Select Works, from
Second Run.
Old Dark House, We The People, and House all nod towards Universal Horror. Fragments of a ghost film never made maybe. The Hycrynium Wood, folk horror. This folds the elements of both strands together and drops the horror. Though the black smoke spewing car operates as something like a harmless beast of the woods; the lurking id of the man, the hermit.
A stranger movie than I was expecting. Its ambitions get ahead of the filmmakers’ abilities a bit but the missteps, the most significant being the confrontation just before the epilogue, weren’t where I expected them to be. And I found the meaning behind the event in the second half, which appears to make the relationship between the wealthy patron and desperate artist thuddingly literal, more complex than the negative reviews lead me to believe.
It’s also clear to me where…
Pretty dry and almost humorless, with enough stylistic energy and confidence to keep it above boring. Kind of wish I’d seen it 10 years ago when I would’ve really eaten up it’s young man headiness. But glad I saw it after seeing his excellent All The Vermeers In New York; good feelings from that allowed me to be more open to this. So, probably not the place to start, though it is a very good “first feature.”
Self-involved and self-critical,…
"Why does yesterday wander through today like a ghost? Why is the news still bad? And if we won, why do we look as if we lost? And if Hitler died why does his voice still pursue us through the spaces of American life?"
Hate is an American tradition like baseball. And while the filmmakers admit as much they, understandably, anchor their argument on the hypocrisy of fighting Nazism abroad while ignoring the racism and anti-semitism at home. After all,…
