I learned about Twilight (Stephenie Meyer, Little, Brown & Co., 2005) as a novel when I taught eighth-graders in a tutorial school. After its publication on 5 October, within a fortnight, the novel became a student handbook (quite literally, in everybody’s hands) in every classroom. It was quite a sight to see a roomful of early teenagers lovesick with their imaginary vampires (the multiple forms of Edward Cullen) and the ardent way they discu...

In one interview Kurosawa was asked about the theme of his 1975 film Dersu Uzala, and since the director’s reaction was rather staggering, the interviewer answered his question himself, articulating the theme of the film around the character of Dersu and his wisdom and knowledge of the ways of the forest. [Cardullo:] So one of the film’s themes is man’s harmony with nature – when he achieves it – and how such harmony can only help his relati...

After its worldwide release, Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) has received mixed reviews from both critics and his fellow filmmakers. While the film received a standing ovation at Cannes in May, several critics have expressed worries about the film’s moral stance in its representation of Jewish-American soldiers, and the way it addresses our accepted traumatic memories of WWII. The question is: Whose trauma is it?

While I am writing, the question of same-sex marriage is still a heated debate in most parts of the US (currently eclipsed by healthcare, of course), and will probably remain as such for the next few years (hopefully, not more). The debate has always struck me as a curious test for the imagined integrity of the law: not simply the US Constitution, but the heternormative law as a system that is precisely codified as a difference from what it fa...

This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1923-94; 1963) has been regarded as the last picture show of the shot-lived British New Wave (1959-63). Discussions on the film have been focusing on either the its overt fetishisation of the muscular body of Richard Harris (1930-2002), or its representation of the social reality of the working class in the North of England. Is there anyway we can connect these two together?

The question has bothered me for a long time, and I guess it will continue to do so for years to come. I still remember the unease many of my friends felt after they watched this film by Zhang Yimou in 2002, and the feeling of betrayal among them could be understood in two registers.

On Easter Day, I had a chance to sit back and watch Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961) again. I usually spend time to watch this Hollywood Christ epic for the sacrilegious motive of seeing an utterly desirable Californian surfer boy acting as a saint (complete with his Malibu tan on the cross). Nonetheless, is my desire for the image of Christ as a handsome muscular body as sacrilegious as I thought?

Broken Blossoms (1919) by D.W. Griffith (1879-1948) is now seen as a fantasy of a commonality or universality articulated in the terms of racialised America. What I am curious to pursue here is to reverse this critical assumption: What if the film has been articulated in the terms of China (as a formation, real or imaginary, in a realationship with its imagined “West”)?

As a film director, Sun Yu has always been criticised, even by his own cohorts in the Shanghai industry in the 1930s, as a man who lacked any coherent political commitment. However, more than often, we find in the works of those artists who were being accused a political conviction that is far more subtle, critical, and consistent than what their critics are willing to observe, for these works have precisely exposed the deeper inconsistency of...

There is a memorable scene in the film Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson, 1976), in which Logan 5 (Michael York), in his jovial state of idleness, teleports a series of potential female partners from the community-run circuit (meat market). When a woman of his fancy is finally beamed into his apartment (whose name is revealed later on in the film as Jessica 6 (Jenny Agutter)), Logan welcomes her with open arms, “Let’s have sex!”

When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people -- Salman Rushdie Fritz Lang’s M (1931) – the enigmatic letter of the film’s title stands for the elusive figure of the serial child murderer Hans Beckert, whom we are not supposed to see fully revealed until the film’s dramatic denouement when Beckert, played by Peter Lorre, kneels in front of the viewer, confessing his irrational deeds and venting his desires and anxieties. There ...

Someone from Rome I met a few years ago told me that the government has cleaned up the wasteland on which Pasolini fell and took his last breath.

For obvious reasons, films about academics catch my attention. The latest, “Examined Life,” by Astra Taylor, who also made “Zizek!”, opens in New York and I read two reviews and an interview with Taylor. I'm always curious about how academics are perceived, understood (or misunderstood), and talked about by those outside the profession, reading with a kind of wariness to see which of the usual tropes will get trotted ou...

A week ago, I promised my friend O Solovieva to write a sequel to her article “Whose Funny Valentine?” As usual, I admire immensely her astute analysis of Slumdog Millionaire, and was flattered that she was able to open up the mise en abîme of the little comment I made in my email and deconstruct the underlying assumption I had in my criticism.

I remember that in mid-February 1999 the New Yorker published a note from Salman Rushdie entitled “Uncanny Valentine.” It was about the death sentence he received from the Muslim fundamentalists one February 14 for his alleged assault on Islam in his Satanic Verses. When I recently watched Slumdog Millionaire and overheard some of the to-do about the question of the representation of India in this film (orientalist or not? offensive or not? et...

When I read literature about Kurosawa’s ambiguous position between the East and the West, I see a tendency to construe the relationship between Western and Japanese sensibility as a chasm and to discuss Kurosawa’s work in terms of his attempts to bridge it. But this bridge always appears to me as rather a forced construction, which in the end only re-enforces the sense of a fundamental gap between the East and the West.

The other day, Yale's student-run Cinema at the Whitney series showed Godard's A Woman Is a Woman (Une femme est une femme) from 1961. What a naughty piece of charming misogyny! But there is much more to it.

I recently discovered a website called Kids in Mind, which rates movies for parents so they can determine whether they are appropriate for their children to watch. Their rating system is much more complicated than G-PG-R. Each movie gets three numbers, one for Sex & Nudity, one for Violence & Gore and one for Profanity. Fifteen movies scored a perfect ten in the first category.

Precisely at the moment when “French” has become a synonym for wickedness, all things French seem to be doing very well in the realm of popular culture, from Madeleine Peyroux to the Oscars, to speak nothing of fashion and food, which never entirely fall out of touch with the Hexagon. The success of Ratatouille in particular reflects the complexities of contemporary Franco-American cultural relations.

I was planning to write something on the documentary Dear Pyongyang for this week but have not been able to get my grubby hands on the film. I did, however, stumble upon the truly horrendous romantic comedy Because I Said So, which is about an uptight, controlling mother (played by Diane Keaton) displacing her anxiety over growing old, alone, onto her youngest daughter’s love life. I wouldn’t be paying this movie the compliment of attention ex...

Too swamped to post anything original this week, so I'm dusting off a cluster of short film “reviews” from about a year ago.

Too much going on this week to manage something coherent; if you're in the mood I recommend reading the stuff everyone else is writing on the site, which keeps striking me as really good. 1. Big Love I gave up on Big Love this week. About halfway through an episode, I turned to my spouse, who'd already wandered into the kitchen, and said, “you know what? I'm done.” Ejected the DVD, put season 1's two remaining discs back in their N...

I’ve been a big Forest Whitaker fan for some time and was eager to see The Last King of Scotland (2007, Dir. Kevin Macdonald) upon its release. Of course, I ended up watching it on DVD, and only then after it spent 6 weeks sitting in my living room in its Netflix envelope. The film earned Whitaker an Oscar and was well reviewed by most of the critics I like. While ostensibly sort-of a movie about Uganda, I for one concluded that it’s Scots. An...

Yan Ting-yuen’s 2005 documentary Yangbanxi provides a look back at and a where-are-they-now update on the Eight Model Works of the Cultural Revolution. During the height of the influence of Jiang Qing, a.k.a. Madame Mao, these works were the only ones allowed to be produced on stage or screen. Yan’s film not only offers a glimpse of such, um, classics as Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy and Red Women’s Detachment but also features extensive c...

Three times in the last week or so I’ve tuned in to a documentary because of an interest in its subject matter and each time discovered that although the subjects were not French the documentaries were. For today’s post: three brief reviews and a closing reflection on the Frenchness of it all.