Stolen glimpses, captive shadows: writing on film, 2002-2012 9781619022225, 9781306439695, 1306439698, 1619022222

"We watch what is moving fast from a platform that is also moving fast," writes Geoffrey O'Brien in the b

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English Pages 337 pages Year 2013

Stolen glimpses, captive shadows: writing on film, 2002-2012
9781619022225, 9781306439695, 1306439698, 1619022222

Author / Uploaded
Geoffrey O'Brien

Table of contents :
Popcorn park (Sam Raimi's Spider-Man) --
Learning to argue with Pauline Kael --
This is how it happens (Eric Rohmer's The lady and the duke) --
Prospero on the run (Steven Spielberg's Minority report) --
Minister of fear (Fritz Lang) --
An artisan of the unseen (Jacques Tourneur) --
Devotional furies (Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: vol. 1) --
Getting medieval at the multiplex (Mel Gibson's The passion of the Christ) --
Was it all just a dream? (Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11) --
The return of the Shaw brothers --
The man in the smoking jacket (Cary Grant) --
Gangsters with toothbrushes (Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au grisbi) --
Calligraphy in blood (Kihachi Okamoto's The sword of doom) --
The comfort of Martians (Steven Spielberg's War of the worlds) --
A memory of Columbo --
Hero in waiting (John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln) --
The gleam of luminous water (Val Lewton) --
The labyrinth of adulthood (Carol Reed's The fallen idol) --
Meditations at the cinema café --
All aboard (Alfred Hitchcock's The lady vanishes) --
The guy with the sax (Edgar Ulmer's Detour) --
A northern New Jersey of the mind (David Chase's The Sopranos) --
Between heaven and hell (Akira Kurosawa's High and low) --
Redoubled obsessions (Magnificent obsession by John Stahl and Douglas Sirk) --
A persistent immediacy (Eric Rohmer's The romance of Astrea and Celadon) --
The old frontier (John Ford's The man who shot Liberty Valance) --
A great book of instances (Frederick Wiseman) --
The invention of the world (Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless) --
Dreamland (Josef von Sternberg's Underworld) --
Left alone (Leo McCarey's Make way for tomorrow) --
Dark magic (Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the beast) --
The variety of filmic experience (Terrence Malick's The tree of life) --
The secret life of objects (Olivier Assayas's Summer hours) --
The rapture of the silents (Michel Hazanavicius's The artist, Martin Scorsese's Hugo, Victor Sjöström's The phantom carriage) --
Dreaming of water (Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the southern wild, Wes Anderson's Moonrise kingdom) --
A drifter and his master (Paul Thomas Anderson's The master) --
Andrew Sarris, 1928-2012.