Sailing against the tide
Perfect Days “Perfect Days”, Wim Wenders’ latest movie set in Tokyo, is a very poetic, minimalistic film about finding joy in the simple things of life. (I am usually not a great fan of Wenders, but this is a good one). In the film, the main character works as a public toilet cleaner, although his…
The Criterion channel has been doing a Hal Hartley retrospective, so I decided to watch or re-watch some of his films. As you may know, Hartley was one of the indie cinema darlings of the early 1990s, together with the likes of Jim Jarmusch and others. Jarmusch is still around, but Hal Hartley, which had…
It’s a Barbie world, sang a song, and now we hear the same tune in a movie. But we do NOT live in a Barbie world. If anything, it’s quite the opposite. For all its defects and its shallow consumerism, Barbie’s world was kitsch but at least it was pink and cheerful. But our modern…
Martin Scorsese has just published an article about Fellini at Harper’s magazine, but which also discusses a bit the current sad state of cinema. Today, he says, everything has become merely indistinct “content”, and the magic of cinema and its artistic auteurs has been lost. I tend to agree. When I was a teenager, I…