8 result(s) tagged “Five Minutes”

With Rob Zombie’s remake in theaters this weekend, I thought it would be a good opportunity to explore why Michael Myers (or “The Shape”) worked so well in John Carpenter’s 1978 movie Halloween.

In this commentary track, part of Culture Snob’s Five Minutes series, I use the movie’s ending to discuss the transformation of Michael Myers from troubled child into bogeyman — from human to supernatural.

The deaths last week of movie writers and directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have incited all sorts of commentary about the “art” films of yesteryear and the people who made them.

Tied up in these discussions is one key assumption: that everyday people think these movies are boring, whether they’ve actually seen them or not. “Boring” is a reaction separate from claiming something is “good” or “bad,” of course, but it’s almost more important. If something bores a viewer, it becomes irredeemably irrelevant. So people arguing for the importance of Bergman and Antonioni must first make their movies sexy.

The contradictions of director/co-writer/composer Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer start in the title, with the onomatopoeic softness and ether of a single word paired with a morbid, blunt descriptive subtitle.

Both components are drawn from the novel by Patrick Süskind, but the associations that pile up and pull at each other during the movie’s opening scenes are equally Tykwer’s, cinematic and lovingly ambiguous. The main character is introduced by his nose emerging from the darkness, deeply but measuredly drawing in all that the air carries. There’s something refined in the control of the gesture, yet it recalls vermin assessing its surroundings. Normal humans treat smell as a secondary sense.

Have you calmed down yet?

Are you over the orgasmic delight you felt at the way David Chase defied all predictions about the end of his beloved series, The Sopranos? Have you recovered from your rage about ambiguity, a lack of closure, and Journey?

Good.

Now let’s clear a few things up. Tony Soprano did not die. That last scene was not at all a cinematic expression of Tony’s anxiety, and therefore David Chase did jab his middle fingers into your eyes. Yet there was nothing wrong with the way it ended, even if it was manipulative.

In this “Five Minutes” audio commentary, Culture Snob will explain all that and more, without abruptly cutting to silence mid-sentence.

In honor of the final episode of The Sopranos, Culture Snob takes a look at five minutes from The Wire — a show that probably wouldn’t exist were it not for that crime family from Jersey.

This brief audio commentary — part of the “Five Minutes” series — looks at one scene from The Wire’s first season. In these five minutes, the only dialogue that passes between Baltimore Police detectives Bunk and McNulty are variations on the word “fuck” and one utterance of “pow,” but the audience pieces together how this particular murder went down through visual storytelling and acting devoid of meaningful words.

In a previous entry, I noted the disconnect between Guillermo del Toro’s assertion that Pan’s Labyrinth is “not about sexual identity” and the movie’s marketing materials and design.

In this short audio commentary (part of Culture Snob’s Five Minutes series), we look at the toad scene in the movie to undercut the writer-director’s claim even more. Pan’s Labyrinth is very much about sexual identity, particularly a woman’s reproductive power over a man.

When we say that a movie is more style than substance, we typically mean it derisively.

Oliver Stone’s JFK has a ton of stuff — with the director’s cut running nearly three and a half hours — that was mistaken for its substance. But the meat of the movie is its style, because it’s the fuel that made the film so combustible.

The movie was greeted with contentious debate upon its release in 1991, but Stone’s critics and supporters completely missed the boat by arguing about facts, theories, and cover-ups. JFK works not as an argument but as a style of argument — sly and forceful in equal measure — and an exemplar of contemporary propaganda.

There’s a maxim that says a movie teaches you how to watch it, but Peter Weir’s The Truman Show teaches you how to watch it the wrong way. And in its brazen audience cues, it hints that you should question your reaction to the film. This is a movie that was made for misunderstanding.