Osburnt: Dispatches From a Life Seared by the Arts

  • Only Lovers Left Alive

    Only Lovers Left Alive

    I have never been so admiring of Jim Jarmusch as have his acolytes, but he seemed the perfect choice to direct a vampire movie and had the good taste to include a scene of Yasmine Hamdan singing in a café, so I was drawn without resistance to ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE. There is a lot…

  • Under the Skin

    Under the Skin

    There have been three Scarlett Johansson movies in a row about the moral complexities of physical attraction and human relations in the virtual age, and beyond: Don Jon, in which she compares unfavorably, in the eyes of a boyfriend, with online porn; Her, in which she is the voice of a sultry operating system who…

  • Her

    Her

    The advance press for Under the Skin, by virtue of playing none-too-subtly upon the presence in the film of Scarlett Johansson in a state of undress, has prompted me to revisit my thoughts on Spike Jonze‘s HER, which I didn’t manage to set down when first I saw it. Johansson, of course, plays the voice…

  • Green Porno

    Green Porno

    Isabella Rossellini’s GREEN PORNO is a series of short films that explore, usually with her in costume, the sexual and reproductive life of animals. They are both instructive and delightful (as Horace might have said) and moving (as Cicero would have added). There is an underlying didactic intent, combined with overt theatricality, that tempts one…

  • California Winter

    California Winter

    I was glad to see my friend and former student Elizabeth Dominguez in CALIFORNIA WINTER, which was screened Wednesday as part of the New Directors series at Anthology Film Archives. The film is a noticeably well-informed work about the foreclosure crisis at the heart of the 2008 crash. The writer and director Odin Ozdil explicates…

  • Blue is the Warmest Color

    Blue is the Warmest Color

    The very first thing I noticed about BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR was that blue was the commonest color in shot, after shot, after shot. Articles of clothing, pieces of furniture, spots of paint on the wall, things on the street, park benches, blue in the background, blue in the foreground, blue somewhere in the…

  • In a World

    In a World

    The pleasures afforded by IN A WORLD are basic, but they are not insignificant. They are those of a good idea skillfully realized, and of an unfamiliar world revealed through exceptionally smart storytelling. That world is the Hollywood voiceover industry, and the idea was to make a movie about it from the perspective of its…

  • Una Noche

    Una Noche

    Lucy Mulloy’s UNA NOCHE is exquisitely edited. There are maybe two or three clichéd shots, which stand out precisely because the film as a whole is so fluent and sure handed in its visual rhythms. It is, broadly speaking, divided into two sections, both as a film and as a story: the second, which centers…

  • The Artist and the Model

    The Artist and the Model

    Cinema is the art of the photographic image as it slips away, failing to establish itself, and is given over to the death of the present and the rebirth of the moment. The motion picture that is conscious of the beauty of its own image, and the desire to maintain it, as a photograph or…

  • Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

    Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

    David Lowery’s AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS is a strong silent type of movie, a Lone Star noir full of the unspoken feelings of decent people and the stoic acceptance of what men and women must do when faced with the consequences of their actions. There is more than a touch of nostalgia about it, of…