At the recent annual AAAS conference this past February, one topic was the relationship between oral sex and oral cancer. Researchers brought to light some startling and distressing news for those of us who like to go downstairs while we are going at it: oral sex has actually replaced smoking as the leading cause of oral cancer.
So in the same way that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are evil, so is Tarantino. Pulp Fiction is undoubtedly a masterpiece for its writing, its film buff intertextuality, and New Wave like innovations. But after making 100 million dollars, the world of independent cinema became a lot less independent, and it continues to be that way today.
After I saw the new Mexican film We Are What We Are by Jorge Michel Grau, I left the IFC Center in a state of excitement. Sometimes a films comes along that just completely baffles me, and I think, what the hell was really going on? It’s almost as if I’m in a state of disbelief – this movie just passed before my eyes? Someone made that?
When professor Brian O’Blivian says, “television is reality and reality is less than television,” it was like he was quoting from Baudrillard’s “Precession of the Simulacra”… I realized that it was really fun to theorize about Cronenberg, and I did my final presentation for the consumer culture course on Videodrome. When I showed the ending sequence to the class, they had a what the fuck kind of look on their faces.
We discovered that all of Catherine’s tires were flat. This was distressing. I started to think, oh shit, I’m not going to be able to get my French homework done…I consoled Catherine, but also told her that I was nervous about school work.
Gary Numan, the enigmatic, robotic man behind the hit single “Cars” (’79), might just have been a great visionary during the ’80s and inadvertently predicted things like the internet and Facebook – in the film world, the same might be said of David Cronenberg; his films Scanners (’81) and Videodrome (’83) surely have a special spot in media theory paradise.
Ed Holms is Tim Lippe, a naïve insurance seller from a small town in Wisconsin. He’s carrying on a torrid affair with Marcy, his former school teacher. When one of his colleagues kills himself in a freak auto-erotic asphyxiation accident, Tim’s world is shattered. Not only that, his boss asks him to go to a regional insurance conference in the city of Cedar Rapids in the stead of his late co-worker.
In the history of the rather broad genre of music often considered folk or “singer-songwriter,” whatever that actually means, Leonard Cohen probably has one of the most fascinating and curious careers. Generally speaking, he is one of the more interesting celebrity figures for his reclusive and elusive nature that turned into a larger-than-life personality…
On the road, I thought to myself, oh shit I’m way too tired. Oh shit. I turned up the radio, opened the window. I made it ok to the parking lot and retrieved my wallet. To get home faster I pulled onto the highway. I was doing ok, I guess. Then I woke up to a loud smash; I had rear-ended an SUV. Shit shit shit I thought.
For a while, they are able to function without their mother, but slowly over time their conditon deterioates. The film is fascinating for the way it patiently documents this slow decline. The children seem to accept the absence of their mother as if it’s nothing out of the ordinary, but eventually as they run out of money their condition worsens and tragedy creeps up.