An inventory of all my writing on cinema

This is an inventory all of all my film articles, updated whenever I write something new. I put the general / theoretical articles first, followed by more specific reviews and analyses. Christopher Nolan of course gets his own section, as does Drive. Enjoy!

Arguments for an expanded notion of cinema:

• How Many Cinemas Are There?
• Why Do You Need So Many Cinemas?
• DIY Geek Cinema
• Are Animated Gifs a Type of Cinema?

Other overviews:

• How Many Movies Are There?
• How Many Movies Have You Seen?
• The Lowest-Grossing Movies of 2011
• The 248 Best Movies of 2011
• The 240 Best Movies of 2012
• The 474 Best Movies of 2011 & 2012
• The Longest Average Shot Lengths in Modern Hollywood
• The 1970s vs. the 2000s (in Hollywood film, at least)
• What Mise-en-scène Is and Why It Matters
• What’s So New about New Wave?

Christopher Nolan:

Inception:

• Seventeen Ways of Criticizing Inception
• Art as Device, and Device (When It Works) as Miracle (or, The Princess Bride vs. Inception)
• Scott Pilgrim vs. Inception for the Future of the Cinematic Imagination
• More on Inception: Shot Economy and 1 + 1 = 1
• A D Jameson Talks about Movies #1 — The opening scenes of Inception (YouTube video)

The Dark Knight Rises:

• The Ever Risable Dark Knight
• We Need to Talk About Batman
• Reading Frank Miller’s influences on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy

Drive:

• my initial review
• Let’s watch a scene from Drive and analyze it
• Cliché as Necessity (Birthing Innovation)
• Something Film Understands but that Literature Doesn’t
• A Little Bit More on Cliché
• my commentary track for Drive (yes, an actual full-length commentary track, in mp3 form)

The Hobbit:

• The Hobbit Part 1: An Unexpected Journey (+ a Ryan Gosling-meme bonus)
• The Hobbit Part 2: The Desolation of Smaug

Other movie reviews & analyses:

• Blue Jasmine
• Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
• Breakfast with Curtis
• Cloud Atlas
• Dogtooth (Kynodontas)
• Doom House & Mood House
• Fellini’s television commercials
• Hail the New Puritan (+ an earlier review)
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Jurassic World: here and here
• Laura
• Lifeforce
• Night Moves
• Only God Forgives
• Prometheus
• Raiders of the Lost Ark
• Ringing Bell
• Roundhay Garden Scene
• Shoplifting from American Apparel
• Somebody That I Used To Know (yes, the Gotye music video)
• Star Wars: The Force Awakens + my response to the initial casting announcement
• The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
• The Ladies Man
• The Neon Demon
• There Will Be Blood
• The World’s End: 1st take | 2nd (better) take
• Tom Carvel’s experimental ice cream commercials
• Total Eclipse of the Heart (the Bonnie Tyler music video)
• Total Recall + Showgirls
• Transformers: Age of Extinction
• Two-Lane Blacktop
• Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi)

My Favorite New Movies (my yearly round-ups):

• 2009
• 2010
• 2011
• 2012

A D & Jeremy Talk about Movies:

• #0: announcing the series
• #1: Source Code, Friends, Woody Allen, The Man from London, Sucker Punch, Zardoz, Tron, Willow, and Shoot ‘Em Up
• #2: Source Code, Moon, and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
• #3: Mel Gibson’s Hamlet, all films Kenneth Branagh, Sleuth, Joseph Mankiewicz, Thor, superhero movies in general
• #4: Midnight in Paris (and other recent Woody Allens)
• #5: Extra: Ranking Woody Allen
• #6: The Tree of Life
• #7: Extra: Linda’s Voice-Over Narration in Days of Heaven
• #8: X-Men: First Class

Memorials:

• Maria Schneider
• Miklós Jancsó
• Robert Ashley
• William Lubtchansky

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Faev snogs: Fantastic Everlasting Gobstopper, “Schoolgirl Psychedelia”

I first heard this song on a radio program my pal John Dixon taped for me, then spent a decade trying to identify it. I played it for employees at Reckless Records and everything. Jeremy M. Davies finally figured it out, as I documented over at HTMLGiant.

Fantastic Everlasting Gobstopper is also Angela Faye Tillett, aka Death By Chocolate. Wherever or whoever she is now—thanks for this song!

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Faev snogs: The Shaggs, “It’s Halloween” (with some musings on the New Sincerity and faux-naive art in general)

Because it is.

Some cover versions, after the jump.

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ABR reviewed both HTMLGIANTand Big Other

American Book Review recently featured a section on “book blogs,” which included reviews of both HTMLGIANT (by Matthew Vollmer) and Big Other (by Mary Miller).

(I was mentioned in both, for what it’s worth.)

The whole feature was edited by Brian Carr, and also includes reviews of NewPages and The Rumpus and The Millions and The Nervous Breakdown and Bookslut and The Barking and MobyLives.

Random trivia tidbit: I was once the layout editor of ABR, 2000–1.

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I’m going to be on the radio later today

Update: You can listen to the (archived) broadcast here!

On the Colin McEnroe Show on WNPR, Connecticut Public Radio. It’s from 1–2pm ET (12–1 CT). They’re doing a show on sincerity, and speaking with the author R. Jay Magill, author of the very recent book Sincerity: How a moral ideal born five hundred years ago inspired religious wars, modern art, hipster chic, and the curious notion that we all have something to say (no matter how dull).

I’ll be on in the second half of the show, speaking about the New Sincerity, which I’ve written a bit about at HTMLGIANT:

• 28 May: “Viktor Shklovsky wants to make you a better writer, part 2”
• 04 June: “What we talk about when we talk about the New Sincerity, part 1”
• 07 June: “I am drinking gin & wrote about 18 long titles i randomly chose using wikipedia”
• 11 June: “What we talk about when we talk about the New Sincerity, part 2”
• 14 June: “23 brief replies to Blake Butler & Elisa Gabbert & Johannes Göransson & Chris Higgs re: (dear god, what else?) the fucking New Fucking Sincerity“

And here’s more on Magill’s book, which I’m very happy to now know about.

Hope you can tune in! (Online, click here, then click “Listen Live.”)

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Another example of the word splitting technique

I used this technique when writing my first novel, Giant Slugs. The opening sentence of it is:

We’ll all follow the finer taboos, the tattoos of a pro percussionist’s tom-toms.

To whit:

• We’ll all < wall (every chapter in GS starts with a play on that word)
• pro percussionist < proper
• percussionist’s tom-toms < custom

Thus, the sentence contains the line “We’ll all follow the finer taboos and proper customs.”

I used this technique a lot in writing the novel, but the only other example I can think of at the moment is the line “Wisdom draped from them like clad oaks.” The draped trees therein were originally “cloaks.”

I don’t think anyone will ever really notice this or care, but I had a really great time writing Giant Slugs, and hopefully that pleasure and playfulness comes through.

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Guides to all of my HTMLGIANT posts and all of my Big Other posts

I’ve written a lot at both HTMLGIANT and Big Other and so, mainly for my own sake, I’ve created guides to those all posts.

The HTMLGIANT guide is here. It is as of yet mostly uncategorized, though I’ve added some general keywords describing each post.

The Big Other guide is here. It is categorized to the point of redundancy.

This is of course assuming of course that you care to (re-)visit any of that writing. (If so, thanks!)

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I gave a lecture at Co-Prosperity Sphere

Me, lecturing. Photo by Caroline Picard.

Last week was such a busy one for me that I forgot to mention that I was giving a lecture at Co-Prosperity Sphere. This was part of a mini-symposium organized by Lily Robert-Foley, Location/Location: The Mistranslation of Objects, which was part of the show Field Static, curated by Caroline Picard and Devin King. The other symposium participants were Meredith Kooi, Laura Goldstein & Brett Balogh, Gene Tanta, and T. Siddle.

I had promised to talk about “Conceptual Writing’s Aesthetic and Political Commitments,” but instead I presented two of my recent HTMLGIANT “generating text” posts: “The Spell Check Technique” and “Dictionary Expansions.” You can see photos from the event here.

Field Static will be up through 13 June, and includes work by Rebecca Mir, Carrie Gundersdorf, Heather Mekkelson, Ellen Rothenberg, Stephen Lapthisophon, Christian Kuras, Duncan MacKenzie, Mark Booth, and my former roommate Justin Cabrillos. Co-Prosperity Sphere is open on Sundays from 1-4 and by appointment.

The show in the space. Photo by Caroline Picard.

Thanks, Lily, Caroline, and Devin! And congrats, Caroline & Devin! I still think you should hyphenate your surnames: “King Picard”!

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A Guide to All of My Writing at HTMLGIANT

The articles are starting to pile up there, so I created a section at my website that links to each post.

I also took a moment to update my guide to all of my writing at Big Other. Enjoy…

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“Top Ten Indie-Lit [Pencils] We’d Rather See Than Jordan Castro’s”

I’m flattered. Top of the list, too. Thanks to Tim, Mike, and all the others for making my day!

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