#postmodern cinema

[dickstrangler445]

[maggiecheungs]

does anybody have any recommendations for any african metacinema or postmodern cinema?

[cinemaandstuffs]

Jennifer’s Body (2009)

directed by Diablo Cody

[germenis]

Review: The Disaster Artist (2017)

Review: The Disaster Artist (2017)

“It’s not a room, it’s the room.” So says Tommy Wiseau during an interview included as one of the DVD special features on The Room (2005), a film that truly needs no introduction. Since 2003/2005, if you haven’t seen it by now, what are you waiting for?

Wiseau was onto something with his declaration: there are many rooms, but there’s only one The Room–a singular work in the history of American…

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[madragoras]

Ανάλυση: «Η Λούλου στη γέφυρα». Ο μετα-νεωτερικός κινηματογράφος | Περιοδικό MOVE IT

Στο MOVE IT εξετάζουμε ταινίες του πρόσφατου (ή όχι και τόσο) παρελθόντος, υπό ένα διαφορετικό οπτικό πρίσμα και αποκρυπτογραφούμε την εικον

[gloryholehotel]

Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)

Most of the slamming this movie has received came from people who haven't read Thomas Pynchon and therefore couldn't really understand what Anderson was trying to do here. Despite that, the movie isn't great.

Pynchon is one of those postmodern writers who only ostensibly write narrative fiction. In reality, his plots swirl, spin and sprawl, until they become their own thing, not racing toward any conclusion but instead building up a wider and wider network of references and clues. This goes for his larger works as well as books like Inherent Vice, that only count a few hundred pages; his main motif is conspiracy and alternative history, and he's one of those guys who instead of writing about a conspiracy give you the paranoid feeling of being in a conspiracy the workings of which you won't and can't ever understand; which is far more powerful.

However, this also means that trying to fit any of his works into a narrative frame by reducing them to it is a pointless endeavor, because the entire point of the work is automatically lost. You might as well try to retell Ulysses by giving an account of what happened to Bloom on Bloomsday. Accordingly, I've always thought that his books were impossible to turn into films, unless perhaps you rely on experimental devices heavily, and Anderson's effort didn't convince me otherwise.

At the start of the movie, we're introduced to Larry "Doc" Sportello, played (a bit stiffly, I thought) by Joaquin Phoenix, who is an aging hippie (it's 1970) and also a private investigator. In Pynchon's world, this is a totally normal thing, so don't worry. He meets his ex-girlfriend whom he is still in love with, Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), who tells him that the wife and boyfriend of her current lover, wealthy and influential builder Michael Z. Wolfman (Eric Roberts), plan to deal with said lover in some way in order to, presumably, get at his money, but she's not sure about all that, anyway she, along with Wolfman, immediately disappears and Doc takes on the case. It's completely pointless to attempt to give a synopsis of anything that happens from here on out because it's more than you can fit in your head anyway. But here's where the frustrating part comes in: where Pynchon's opaque plots work in the medium of language to create a dark sense of paranoia through cross-references, clever hints and digressions, in narrative film, they become a series of barely interconnected episodes. The truth is that since Anderson is evidently setting out to tell a story in good ol' story-telling terms, and Pynchon's story evidently has a beginning and an end, the viewer is right in their frustration at the fact that the middle seems to fall apart into somewhat weird characters, somewhat weird settings, and somewhat weird episodes. This is especially true for a film that, at 2,5 hours, places higher than average demands on the viewer. The nostalgia for the dream of the 1960s, the suspicion that it has been replaced by something darker, which had always been lurking inside (cf. the title of the movie/book), the sense of witnessing a tipping point of recent history - all of this, which is found in the book, is lost in what ends up being an episodic film.  A bit of creativity with the medium would have done the film a ton of good. Watch only if you've read Inherent Vice and are curious.

[vincentwcerreta]

i made a video tribute to my power animal--the god that is steve buscemi. enjoy. or don’t. i don’t own you. thank you. fuck you.