An accurate history of Japanese internment camps seems conspicuously absent from the U.S. education system. Many young Americans learned more about internment camps from reading Snow Falling on Cedars than in all of high school, and that’s not saying much.
Whenever awards season rolls around, you inevitably hear the same discussion about whether awards shows, the Oscars in particular, really matter. When it comes to the Oscars, the naysayers are often the Joaquin Phoenixes of the world, the surly hipsters trying to ruin everyone’s good time.
This year’s Portland International Film Festival boasts an amazing 93 feature-length films from a total of 44 countries. While the festival offers selections from places like Iran, Senegal, Belgium and even North Korea, the power of Joe and Harry Gantz’s documentary American Winter is that it may hit closer to home than any of the other films.
When 76-year-old Robert Redford took the stage at the Egyptian Theatre on Jan. 17 to give his opening remarks for the Sundance Film Festival, he had some interesting things to say. Redford touched on gun control, diversity and the conservative Utah groups that continue to protest the festival’s presence in their state because of Hollywood’s “moral bankruptcy.” (The same moral bankruptcy that brings the state $100 million in revenue in just 10 days.) He also credited the economic recession with “saving” Sundance.
It’s hard to forget that all the film’s utopian philosophizing comes on the eve of the biggest war in history. Based on the novel Lost Horizon by English author James Hilton, it is undoubtedly a product of its time: It’s almost as if Capra and Hilton knew.
One of the promos for Fox’s new show The Following, which premiered last night in the 9 p.m. time slot, claims, “You won’t believe it’s not on cable.” One’s initial assumption might be that the network is trying to say that the new show equals the quality of the hour-long, meticulously detailed, brilliantly written cable dramas we’ve come to love—shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
It’s still strange to realize that the war in Iraq has become, for the most part, a thing of the past. For years now, people on both sides of the political aisle have admitted it was largely a mistake, a war that began under false pretenses.
When Quentin Tarantino appeared on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson to promote his new movie Django Unchained a couple weeks ago, Ferguson began the interview by remarking on Tarantino’s casual wardrobe, calling it a return to “video store chic.” It was a funny reminder of the legend of Tarantino, which, more than two decades into his career, I think people tend to forget.
The first realization I came to when watching Chris Eyre’s 1998 film Smoke Signals, playing this weekend at PSU’s 5th Avenue Cinema, was that I don’t know the first thing about what life is like for modern Native Americans. I assume that many of us without family or other connections to the culture have no idea.
What is it about films with religious overtones that makes them feel so exhausting? Last year, Terrence Malick inflicted upon the world his visually spectacular—and in every other way completely insufferable—The Tree of Life, which some people considered a masterpiece and I consider the cinematic equivalent of waterboarding.
“The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact,” says Duke
Theseus in his famous Act V speech in William Shakespeare’s comedy of fairy mischief and romantic confusion, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.