Watching a Tora
About poetry and time
The movie is sad
My girlfriend, my cat and I
Sit happily together
Favorite films
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AllPinned reviews
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Tora-san's Salad-Day Memorial 1988
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Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons 1973
The fullest flowering of the chanbara film's decadent phase, its petals hosed red with arterial spray.
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Dog Day Afternoon 1975
"In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." - Susan Sontag
"Or . . . a poetics of sweat? What do you think? Susan? Susan! Wait! Come back! Hear me out . . ." - Sidney Lumet
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Popular reviews
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West Indies 1979
"Don't listen to their books or statues!" The arc of official history denied by the arc of a tracking shot. Liberal teleology subverted by a moving camera that condenses centuries and crosses continents, reordering time and space to recover a people's truth from the lies and omissions of the imperialists, the comprador bourgeoisie, the compromised intellectuals, the reformist politicians and *raises hand guiltily* the First World leftists. Platitudes of progress are criticised, parodied and, finally, superseded by a polyphony of…
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The Shop Around the Corner 1940
The Lubitsch touch applied to the "vulgar details of how we earn our daily bread". A delicate pan away from a lonely man's humiliation; an expected point of view shot, discreetly withheld. The sadness of an empty mailbox; the happiness of a full envelope. Two people - slightly pretentious and mildly annoying, just like us - destroying their illusions so that each might find, in the other, someone willing to grow old with them. It's a wonderful life.
