For those readers who, despite my clues in the “About” box to the right, are still in the dark about Godard’s Contempt, A.O. Scott from the New York Times has a short video primer on the film here. It’s at the Times’ site thus no embedding (and no watching on an iDevice) either. I’m prompted […]
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The city of Christchurch has appeared in feature films infrequently. Philip Matthews uses those appearances as a way in to understanding the current — earthquake-devastated — state of the place: How will we remember these places that have gone or are going? Photos and museum records, memories, references in literature (Kate De Goldi on Radio NZ […]
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In these days when capitalism seems like the cause of all our problems rather than the solution to them, it is more than educational to read the latest letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders from Warren Buffett, an old school capitalist who believes that money should be made by adding value — for customers, shareholders, staff […]
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A dispiriting portrait of the current commercial cinema from Mark Harris in GQ: Such an unrelenting focus on the sell rather than the goods may be why so many of the dispiritingly awful movies that studios throw at us look as if they were planned from the poster backward rather than from the good idea […]
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Lynn Freeman’s Arts on Sunday show returned from the Summer break yesterday but film correspondent Simon Morris was given an extra week off (something to with Matinée Idle I suspect). Because of that, I was asked to fill in and spent a pleasant half an hour chatting with Lynn about what’s been happening over the last […]
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2011’s reviews kick-off on Tuesday with my Summer Holiday round-up. In the meantime let us please celebrate the kind of obsessive attention to detail sadly lacking from most of modern life: a 49 image, 1/85 scale recreation of The Coen Brothers’ masterpiece No Country for Old Men in diorama form. [hat-tip: Gizmodo]
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Dan Slevin is a New Zealand-based writer, broadcaster and consultant. He has reviewed cinema for the Capital Times weekly newspaper since September 2006, seeing and reviewing every film commercially released in Wellington in that time (except, for some reason, Flicka or Beverly Hills Chihuahua).
Dan is a regular contributor to Radio New Zealand National’s Nine to Noon programme and produces and co-hosts the weekly movie podcast, Cinematica.
In addition to being the finest swordsman in all France, he is also the meanest hombre west of the Pecos. He tweets here.
Why Funerals & Snakes? In Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris; 1963), Fritz Lang said of CinemaScope: “It’s only good for funerals and snakes.”