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Film

Classy Class War, Debonair Existentialism: The Holiday Musicals of Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers

by Sarahjane Blum

Film

Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals have the appeal of light reflected from a December snowflake that has fallen precisely half the distance from the streetlamp to the curb. In my mind, that curb is on the north side of the Met with a peripheral view of the Egyptian wing. The more obvious choice might be the side street overlooking the skating rink at Rockefeller center, with its proximity to the city’s greatest art deco design and an overwhelming sense of being absorbed by a moment larger than you. But its just too damned crowded there and an Astaire/Rogers movie requires the space to let a 30-pound dress twirl unencumbered in an environment which has unexpectedly become yours and yours alone.

Empty Metal Jacket: Jarhead's Dereliction of Duty

by Patrick Levell

Film

Art and culture finds itself in a place beyond deconstructionism. We’ve entered The Age of Quantum Irony. The mainstream continues to inflate the pop postmodernism trend of the 1990’s to its bloated red giant of a conclusion. Hollywood never fails to cannibalize its truest love, itself.

Heaven, Purgatory, Hell, The Blues

by David N. Myer

Film

Does the world end with a bang or a whimper or something more paralytic? Will it end in an apocalyptic conflagration, or will the processes of modern life—the alienation at the core of any industrialized media-driven society—be the insidious force that leaves us open mouthed but stifled, desperate to scream and unable to produce any sound, including a whimper?

DOCS IN SIGHT: The Next Way to Watch?

by Williams Cole

Film

A recent TV ad expresses perfectly a new model of “content delivery.” Myriad hipsters lounge in airports, under outdoor sculptures, and on grassy knolls enraptured with the personal video experience on their cell phone. In a media world now consumed with the habits of the Internet and the audience fragmentation of 1000 channels, a paradigm in which people will watch content on demand, even if it means on little screens, is now tangible. With Apple announcing that their iPod can now download and play TV shows and music videos and AOL and Warner Bros. announcing that they will put 30 older television series online supported by an ad you can’t escape, it doesn’t seem like a passing fad. A recent Television Week announced in huge type, “A New Era for TV.” Meanwhile, cable operators are trying to assuage the increasing frustration viewers have with rising costs for the ad saturated and forced packages of pabulum with Video On Demand, a service already partially offered on Time-Warner Cable in NYC.

The Wild, Wild East

by David Varno

Film

Kitsch, Camp, sexploitation, severed limbs, police brutality; Beatniks young and old, video poems, film diaries; punks, drag queens: all of these and much more, Lower East side film.