Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of 'dissenting' bravery.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”
― Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future

“[When asked if he had ever learned anything about his work from film criticism]
No. To see a film once and write a review is an absurdity. Yet very few critics ever see a film twice or write about films from a leisurely, thoughtful perspective. The reviews that distinguish most critics, unfortunately, are those slambang pans which are easy to write and fun to write and absolutely useless. There's not much in a critic showing off how clever he is at writing silly, supercilious gags about something he hates.”
― Stanley Kubrick

“This is not the "relativism of truth" presented by journalistic takes on postmodernism. Rather, the ironist's cage is a state of irony by way of powerlessness and inactivity: In a world where terrorism makes cultural relativism harder and harder to defend against its critics, marauding international corporations follow fair-trade practices, increasing right-wing demagoguery and violence can't be answered in kind, and the first black U.S. president turns out to lean right of center, the intelligentsia can see no clear path of action. Irony dominates as a "mockery of the promise and fitness of things," to return to the OED definition of irony.

This thinking is appropriate to Wes Anderson, whose central characters are so deeply locked in ironist cages that his films become two-hour documents of them rattling their ironist bars. Without the irony dilemma Roth describes, we would find it hard to explain figures like Max Fischer, Steve Zissou, Royal Tenenbaum, Mr. Fox, and Peter Whitman. I'm not speaking here of specific political beliefs. The characters in question aren't liberals; they may in fact, along with Anderson himself, have no particular political or philosophical interests. But they are certainly involved in a frustrated and digressive kind of irony that suggests a certain political situation. Though intensely self-absorbed and central to their films, Anderson's protagonists are neither heroes nor antiheroes. These characters are not lovable eccentrics. They are not flawed protagonists either, but are driven at least as much by their unsavory characteristics as by any moral sense. They aren't flawed figures who try to do the right thing; they don't necessarily learn from their mistakes; and we aren't asked to like them in spite of their obvious faults. Though they usually aren't interested in making good, they do set themselves some kind of mission--Anderson's films are mostly quest movies in an age that no longer believes in quests, and this gives them both an old-fashioned flavor and an air of disillusionment and futility.”
― Arved Mark Ashby, Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV

“Punks are nihilists who see no tomorrow at all, and dwell in a culture of death music and death imagery. Appropriately, Return focuses on a group of punks who bear names like Trash, Suicide, and Scum, their very names indicating their lack of respect for the world, and themselves. They see themselves as nothing in a world that doesn't value them, and won't survive an apocalypse.”
― John Kenneth Muir, Horror Films of the 1980s

“Remember the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey? Bunch of monkeys collecting bones. What‘s that got to do with space? They don‘t even have lasers!

Cut that shit.

And what about Citizen Kane? If they‘d wanted to gross some dollar, they should‘ve called it Dude, Where‘s My Sled?”
― Richard Ayoade, The Grip of Film

“You highbrows writing on movies are nuts! In order to write about movies you must first make them.”
― Orson Welles, Orson Welles: Interviews

“Today, The Birth of it Nation (1915) is boycotted or shown piecemeal; too many more or less well-meaning people still accuse Griffith of having made it an anti-Negro movie. At best, this is nonsense, and at worst, it is vicious nonsense. Even if it were an anti-Negro movie, a work of such quality should be shown, and shown whole. But the accusation is unjust. Griffith went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them, and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does. I don’t entirely agree with him; nor can I be sure that the film wouldn’t cause trouble and misunderstanding, especially as advertised and exacerbated by contemporary abolitionists; but Griffith’s absolute desire to be fair, and understandable, is written all over the picture; so are degrees of understanding, honesty, and compassion far beyond the capacity of his accusers. So, of course, are the salient facts of the so-called Reconstruction years.”
― James Agee

“[On D. W. Griffith]
Even in Griffith’s best work there is enough that is poor, or foolish, or merely old-fashioned, so that one has to understand, if by no means forgive, those who laugh indiscriminately at his good work and his bad. (With all that “understanding,â€� I look forward to killing, some day, some specially happy giggler at the exquisite scene in which the veteran comes home, in The Birth of a Nation) But even his poorest work was never just bad. Whatever may be wrong with it, there is in every instant, so well as I can remember, the unique purity and vitality of birth or of a creature just born and first exerting its unprecedented, incredible strength; and there are, besides, Griffith’s overwhelming innocence and magnanimity of spirit; his moral and poetic earnestness; his joy in his work; and his splendid intuitiveness, directness, common sense, daring, and skill as an inventor and as an artist. Aside from his talent or genius as an inventor and artist, he was all heart; and ruinous as his excesses sometimes were in that respect, they were inseparable from his virtues, and small beside them. He was remarkably good, as a rule, in the whole middle range of feeling, but he was at his best just short of his excesses, and he tended in general to work out toward the dangerous edge. He was capable of realism that has never been beaten and he might, if he had been able to appreciate his powers as a realist, have found therein his growth and salvation. But he seems to have been a realist only by accident, hit-and-run; essentially, he was a poet. He doesn’t appear ever to have realized one of the richest promises that movies hold, as the perfect medium for realism raised to the level of high poetry; nor, oddly enough, was he much of a dramatic poet. But in epic and lyrical and narrative visual poetry, I can think of nobody who has surpassed him, and of few to compare with him. And as a primitive tribal poet, combining something of the bard and the seer, he is beyond even Dovshenko, and no others of their kind have worked in movies.”
― James Agee, Film Writing and Selected Journalism

“[On D. W. Griffith]
What he had above all, his ability as a craftsman and artist, would be hard enough—and quite unnecessary—to write of, if we had typical scenes before us, or within recent memory; since we have seen so little of his work in so many years, it is virtually impossible. I can remember very vividly his general spirit and manner-heroic, impetuous, tender, magniloquent, naive, beyond the endowment or daring of anybody since; just as vividly, I can remember the total impression of various major sequences. By my remembrance, his images were nearly always a little larger and wilder than life. The frame was always full, spontaneous, and lively. He knew wonderfully well how to contrast and combine different intensities throughout an immense range of emotion, movement, shadow, and light. Much of the liveliness was not intrinsic to the characters an the screen or their predicament, but was his own vitality and emotion; and much of it—notably in the amazing flickering and vivacity of his women—came of his almost maniacal realization of the importance of expressive movement.”
― James Agee, Agee on Film, Vol. 2: Five Film Plays

“The best Critics of something are people who love it who are willing to acknowledge the flaws.”
― Council of Geeks

“I hate to break it to charlie, but no matter how hard an artist or entertainer tries to claim their work isn't political, it simply means their ignorant about the politics it perpetuates, their in denial about the politics it perpetrates, or.....(groans)”
― Magie Mae Fish

“A former Hollywood actor and a senior citizen when he first took the oath of office, Reagan was a revolutionary in many significant ways, but not necessarily in the fashion one might expect. His two terms, and the term of his successor as well, might well be described as the greatest chasm between image and reality that this country has ever witnessed.”
― John Kenneth Muir, Horror Films of the 1980s

“Far too many policies President Reagan enacted during his two terms boasted this "Don't Worry, Be Happy"/"Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid" schizophrenia.”
― John Kenneth Muir, Horror Films of the 1980s

“Motel Hell is a black comedy about hypocrisy, about the way in which every person, even serial killers like Farmer Vincent, tell themselves little lies to get through the day. It's easier to do terrible things, one concludes, when you believe you're doing good.”
― John Kenneth Muir, Horror Films of the 1980s

“She was immovable and denied, in teh face of the week's passing, that a two-and-a-half-day job had become a seven-day obsession. She was the grotesque adult embodiment of that properly despised schoolboy creature of fretful, incontinent ambition, a swot.”
― John Osborne, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise

“[from 'A Quiet Place' review in 'Corruptions And Duplications Of Form'] This portrait of the American family under attack from alien invaders comes in the form of a horror movie for MAGA-ites. Here, it is the aliens who snatch children, not ICE. Defeating these aliens requires dry-erase conspiracy charts, a trip-wired perimeter, home-schooling. It's a paranoid fantasy for dads who want to move upstate.”
― A.S. Hamrah, The Earth Dies Streaming

“[from 'Blade Runner 2049' review in 'Cut The Kink'] Here, in a reversal of 'The Force Awakens,' Harrison Ford survives and Gosling, his surrogate son, dies. The last shot of the film shows baby-boomer Ford creepily watching his daughter, a maker of memory implants, through a glass partition. Somehow, this generic version of the female has become the creator and repository of false memories, a scrapbooker of all the unnecessary backstories that have been weighing down screenplays since the original 'Blade Runner' came out. At one point we meet some official Hollywood-movie Tribal Scavengers, followed later by some official Hollywood-movie Meaningless Revolutionaries. Since at least the Matrix movies, such figures have heralded a revolution that never comes, though President Donald Sutherland did get trampled to death by rebels in 'The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2.”
― A.S. Hamrah, The Earth Dies Streaming

“[from 'Mad Max: Fury Road' review in 'We're Not Ugly People'] Miller has also remembered to make the film directly about things, not all subtext begging for explication. The scarcity of water, oil wars, the arms trade, and female emancipation jostle for space with the customized vehicles, coming in and out of focus with the blitz. But when it comes to political subtext, it must be acknowledged that Immortan Joe's demise was predictable from his water-distribution method. Pouring thousands of gallons of water on people's heads from a great height is not the best way to keep them pacified. Better to sell it to them in plastic bottles for ninety-nine cents each.”
― A.S. Hamrah, The Earth Dies Streaming

“Music, too, offers a photograph of the world; characteristically, however, it does this not by copying a few figured sounds but rather by lifting all of the mixed images of extravagance, gushing overflow, and flaming fullness offered by life in its entirety from their immediate objects and weaving them into a carpet—a carpet with its own all-encompassing intensity, quality, and therefore reality.”
― Ernest Bloch

“The first prerogative of any artist, in any medium, is to make a fool of himself.”
― Pauline Kael

“Asıl ‘Boyun EÄŸmeyenler’in ise öyküleri henüz anlatılmadı; anlatılmayı bekliyorlar. Vietnam’Ä� Amerikan filmleriyle öğrendiÄŸimiz gibi, direnenleri de direndikleri güçlerin anlatıları üzerinden anlamlandırıyoruz. Bir Afrika atasözünde olduÄŸu gibi: “Aslanlar kendi hikayelerini yazmadıkça, avcıların hikayelerini dinlemek zorundayız.â€�
Aslında zorunda deÄŸiliz; bu hikayelerin iÅŸin aslı deÄŸil, avcı hikayeleri olduÄŸunun farkına varmakla baÅŸlayacak özgürleÅŸme yolculuÄŸumuz...”
― UlaÅŸ BaÅŸar Gezgin, Bir Mürekkep Testi Olarak Film: Anlatıbilim Açısından Film Psikolojisi ve Film Çözümlemeleri

“Politics is just love, sex, food, clothes, money, and correct society in a different form.”
― Jeanine Basinger, A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960

“There are too many scenes where you think, It’s a bit much. The movie crowds you; it doesn’t give you room to have an honest emotion.”
― Pauline Kael

“We’re left to ponder whether this lazy literary mindfuck might have worked better on the printed page, only to conclude that, no, the prose is too dreadful.”
― Christopher Orr

“I would like also to recommend Random Harvest to those who can stay interested in Ronald Colman's amnesia for two hours and who could with pleasure eat a bowl of Yardley's shaving soap for breakfast, and Life Begins at 8:30 to those who can still be tickled by Monty Wooley's beard and Nunnally Johnson's lines (both good things in moderation), at the end of what seems hours. I also urge that Ravaged Earth, which is made up of Japanese atrocities, be withdrawn until, if ever, careful enough minds, if any, shall have determined whether or not there is any morally responsible means of turning it loose on the public.”
― James Agee, Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies

“Crossfire is., pre-eminently, a film noir and it is this fact which throws most doubt on the social reading offered by many Anglo-American critics. The film noir is definable partly in thematic and partly in stylistic terms, but what seems incontestible is that the meanings spoken by the genre are less social, relating to the problems (such as antisemitism) of a [particular society, and more metaphysical, having to do with angst and loneliness as essential elements of the human condition. The latter are substantially the meanings spoken by Crossfire.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays