We don’t usually recommend streaming titles you have to rent as standalones, but when Don Hertzfeldt suddenly drops a sequel to World of Tomorrow, I’ll make an exception.
Judging by the reactions of friends, Hertzfeldt seems to fall pretty squarely in the love-it-or-hate-it column.
There is a recurring image in The Water Protectors of Wakpa Waste — the new documentary about anti-pipeline and extractive energy struggles on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, and the people waging those struggles — that sticks in the mind: small icicles clinging to concertina wire.
Macon Blair doesn’t personally show up much in his writing/directing debut I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore. — he has more screen time in The Florida Project, probably — but you can feel his jittery, cold-sweat presence throughout.
It’s almost Thanksgiving and Sean Baker’s The Florida Project is holding fast to its top-tier position on many folks’ Best of 2017 list (mine included), rightfully generating some awards talk. His Tangerine was one of the very best films of 2015.
Since its founding in 1984, the aptly-named Oddball Films has constituted one of the stranger spaces in the cinema world. An archive as interested in orphan home video, Italian psychedelic cartoons from the 60s, and instructional bumpers about hygiene intended for American classrooms as any neorealist classic or lost masterpiece, it was the brainchild of Stephen Parr, who passed away on October 24th.
Blade Runner — 1982’s Ridley Scott-directed, Hampton Fancher-penned sci-fi classic — wasn’t immediately received as the resolutely grimy masterpiece of a Philip K. Dick adaptation that fans now cherish.
The New York Times went with “muddled yet mesmerizing,” complaining that Scott “expect(s) overdecoration to carry a film that has neither strong characters nor a strong story,” for instance, and Roger Ebert, in an otherwise positive review, concluded “[T]he movie has the same trouble as the replicants: Instead of flesh and blood, its dreams are of mechanical men.”