French filmmaker Francoise Romand debuted in 1986 with a remarkable documentary called Mix-Up ou meli-melo. In telling the story of two English families whose lives were tangled by fate when their babies were inadvertently switched at birth, Romand used a number of striking visual and structural techniques to evoke the psychological and class elements of […]
There’s still no recognizable pattern to my DVD watching, but maybe I shouldn’t worry about it. If my viewing became more systematic, it would probably start to feel like work. I finally finished getting through the British TV series Department S, which I mentioned a while back. It never really improved, though perhaps the production […]
If I’m in a room talking to someone and there happens to be a bookcase nearby, or a shelf of DVDs, I become easily distracted from the conversation as I try to read titles to get some idea of the other person’s tastes and interests. A similar thing happens when I watch a movie: if […]
Christopher Smith is an English director whose first feature, Creep (2004), was an attempt to emulate Gary Sherman’s Raw Meat (aka Deathline, 1973) and Douglas Cheek’s C.H.U.D. (1984); it had a woman trapped overnight in the London Underground, pursued by the mutant remnants of some medical experiments in a hidden lab, but it never quite […]
With the Steven Spielberg-Peter Jackson motion-capture version of Tintin due for release next Christmas, the British Film Institute has shown good timing in unearthing, and releasing on all-region DVD, the only two live-action movies ever made featuring Herge’s quiff-haired boy reporter. Apparently, Herge himself had been dissatisfied with previous animated adaptations and approved of plans […]