MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

The second section of this blog post (labeled “DB”) from Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s “Observations on film art and Film Art” blog is a great summary of the classic Hollywood continuity editing, starting off with a brief discussion of the tableau technique. The tableau reminds me of how many early comic strips were drawn [...]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 #1 by Joss Whedon and George Jeanty. Dark Horse, 2007. I’m a big fan of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’ve probably watched the complete run at least 4 times. I was sad to see the show go, but it ended at a good point as far [...]

Two quotes from David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (Penguin, 2006). Lynch discusses transcendental meditation and a lot about artistic process in short chapters. Most interesting for the insight offered onto his films and how they come together in different ways, and how their meanings are sometimes planned, sometimes aleatory, and [...]

Thanks to friends with HBO OnDemand, I watched the complete second season of Deadwood this past weekend. After 11 hours of the show I can unreservedly call it my favorite currently ongoing tv series. The writers maintained and perhaps even exceeded the quality of the first season, building upon already introduced characters, plots, and themes [...]

(1962) Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Criterion recently released this dvd of Bertolucci’s first film. He co-wrote the screenplay from a story by Pier Pasolini. It’s a Rashomon structured story involving the police interviewing a number of individuals about a murdered prostitute. The movie is divided into segments showing us (with sometime contradictory voiceover) what the [...]

Went to the Secret Cinema‘s Velvet Underground Film Festival last night, which included 2 long and a bunch of short VU/Warhol related films. Two sets of screen tests featuring Nico, Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, John Cale, Susan Sontag, Helmut Newton, Salvador Dali, and a few Factory regulars, wherein the subjects sit in front of a [...]

Dir. Jean Vigo (1934). This is wonderful romantic film that is quietly fantastic. The majority takes place on a river barge. Lots of flowing water. A few of the scenes are quite surreal. In one the protagonists, Jean and Juliette a newly married couple, are sleeping in separate beds far from each other. They simultaneously [...]

(1947) Dir. Delmer Daves. This is one of the lesser known Bogart and Bacall pictures. A film noir that has an actual happy ending, at least as happy as these things get. One of the either interesting or annoying (depending on the viewer) aspects of the film is that for the first 20 minutes or [...]

Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996) This collection of essays on film noir covers broad territory and, as such, was not something I read all the way through. The essays include attempts at defining and delimiting film noir, arguments for or against it as a genre, analyses [...]

I come upon this stuff even when I’m not looking for it. From “Out of What Past? Notes on B Film Noir” by Paul Kerr (1979) in the Film Noir Reader, Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (NY: Limelight Editions, 1996) (107-27): Artistic ingenuity in the face of economic intransigence is one critical commonplace about [...]

Dir. Tsai Ming-Liang (2003). DVD. This is a slow and beautiful film–the former quality nicely works with the latter to allow one to linger over the images presented. Ming-Liang must spend a great deal of time working out his settings. Colors are vivid and complementary–even a public washroom is presented in muted yellows and blues. [...]

Dir. Robert Aldrich (1955) DVD. In their Panorama of Film Noir Borde and Chaumeton consider this the closing bookend to film noir (the opening one being The Maltese Falcon). It’s nuclear age terror certainly kicks the violence of noir up to a new level. While the protagonist, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, is far from sympathetic [...]

Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953 by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton (1955). Translation by Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights, 2002). This book by two Frenchman was the first written on the genre known as film noir. Through the course of the short volume (160 pages) the authors display a surprising knowledge of American [...]

Dir. John Huston. In their Panorama of Film Noir, Borde and Chaumeton consider this is the beginning of film noir, so I had to watch it again. The confused plot, the suppressed eroticism (look at Mary Astor’s expression when she asked Bogie if he’s going to do something else “exciting” if she lies to him), [...]

Alas, everyone else is doing it… I’m not usually very current with my consumption, so here is my very short list of favorites from 2004: New Novel: Vanishing Point, David Markson (Perhaps not as great as his previous This is Not a Novel, but still worth much more than most novels) New in Paperback: VAS: [...]

The Five Obstructions (2003). Jorgen Leth and Lars Von Trier. Now available on DVD. French language website. This past week I finally saw Lars Von Trier’s “The Five Obstructions”. The film was immediately of interest to me when I heard about it earlier in the year: Von Trier gets filmmaker Leth to remake Leth’s short [...]

From a book I recently bought (on sale from Schoenhof’s, the foreign bookstore in Cambridge): Mais je proposerai plutôt l’exemple du musicien, puisque j’ai conçu mes Contes moraux à la manière de six variations symphoniques. Comme lui, je varie le motif initial, le ralentis ou l’accélère, l’allonge ou le rétrécis, l’étoffe ou l’épure. A partir [...]