Nick's Flick Picks: The Blog
A film blog under the influence
With all the history made yesterday, let's keep a theme alive and keep engaging with reality. Highly mediated and stage-managed versions of reality, not unlike an inaugural festivity, but reality nonetheless. As ever, some realities are better than others.Labels: Awards 2008, Documentary
posted by NicksFlickPicks at 9:00 AM
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MY PROFILE THE LATEST THE BEST THE FAVORITES THE WOMEN THE REST |
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The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema ($30/pbk). By Nick Davis. Oxford University Press, 2013.
The book that earned me tenure at Northwestern. Offers a new theoretical model of queer film, born from Gilles Deleuze's rarely-integrated notions of cinema and desire. Chapter-length readings of
Dead Ringers,
Naked Lunch, Shortbus, The Watermelon Woman, Brother to Brother, Beau travail, and
Velvet Goldmine, plus other films along the way! Written for a scholarly audience but hopefully interesting to anyone curious about recent cinema, ideas about desire, or LGBT aesthetics and politics. "Important and needed work...Deeply original." —D.N. Rodowick, "Seductive in its intellect and humbling in its prose." —Michele Aaron
Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television ($32/pbk). Ed. Michael DeAngelis. Wayne State University Press, 2014.
Academic pieces that dig into recent portraits in popular media, comic and dramatic, of intimacies between straight(ish) men. Includes the essay
"'I Love You, Hombre': Y tu mamá también as Border-Crossing Bromance" by Nick Davis, as well as chapters on Superbad, Humpday, Jackass, The Wire, and other texts. Written for a mixed audience of scholars, students, and non-campus readers. Forthcoming in June 2014. "Remarkably sophisticated essays." —Janet Staiger, "Essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary models of gender and sexuality." —Harry Benshoff
Fifty Key American Films ($31/pbk). Ed. Sabine Haenni, John White. Routledge, 2009. Includes my essays on
The Wild Party,
The Incredibles, and
Brokeback Mountain. Intended as both a newcomer's guide to the terrain
and a series of short, exploratory essays about such influential works as The Birth of a Nation, His Girl Friday, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song,
Taxi Driver, Blade Runner, Daughters of the Dust, and Se7en.
The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven
Allows ($25/pbk). Ed. James Morrison. Wallflower Press, via Columbia University Press, 2007. Includes the essay
"'The Invention of a People': Velvet Goldmine and the Unburying of Queer Desire" by Nick Davis, later expanded and revised in The Desiring-Image.
More, too, on Poison, Safe, Far From Heaven, and Haynes's other films by Alexandra Juhasz, Marcia Landy,
Todd McGowan, James Morrison, Anat Pick, and other scholars. "A collection as intellectually and emotionally
generous as Haynes' films" —Patricia White, Swarthmore College
Film Studies:
The Basics ($23/pbk). By Amy Villarejo. Routledge, 2006, 2013. Award-winning
film scholar and teacher Amy Villarejo finally gives us the quick, smart, reader-friendly guide to film vocabulary that every
teacher, student, and movie enthusiast has been waiting for, as well as a one-stop primer in the past, present, and future of film production, exhibition,
circulation, and theory. Great glossary, wide-ranging examples, and utterly unpretentious prose that remains rigorous in its analysis;
the book commits itself at every turn to the artistry, politics, and accessibility of cinema.
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Chicagoans! This site doesn't even accept advertising, but I'm making an unsolicited exception for the best, freshest, most affordable meal you can enjoy in the Loop, at any time of the day, whether you're on the go or eager to sit. Cuban and Latin American sandwiches, coffees, pastries, salads, shakes, and other treats. Hand-picked, natural, and slow-cooked ingredients. My friendly neighborhood place, a jewel in my life even before the Reader and Time Out figured it out. Visit!
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Watch this space! Chicago has a new, exciting, important, and totally accessible cadre of queer film critics who are joining forces to bring screenings, special events, and good, queer-focused movie chats to our fair city. Read our mission! Stay tuned for events! Cruise the website, and help get this great new group off the ground by enrolling as a friend (it's free!) and by asking how you can help.
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since 5.27.05 |
3 Comments:
Hello!
Given that the insane awards-season work regime is almost certainly going to mean abandoning my own lists, I feel the urge to chime in all over the place, if that's OK. Only Man, Trouble and Taxi have made it over here, but the two 'T's would make my five -- I prefer The King of Kong (which I know made your list last year) and Of Time and the City to Man on Wire, and I prefer the fantastic French concept-doc Our Daily Bread to all of the above.
Man on Wire = good, but too Errol Morris, too much of the time. Discuss.
I've also been pondering the scarcity of your score picks. Two of mine would be from good films you've yet to see -- Rupert Wyatt's The Escapist, which has a tremendously clever score by Benjamin Wallfisch that actually contains plot clues, and Linha de passe, in which Gustavo Santaolalla does much grittier and more specific work than he's been peddling for bigger films lately, and creates this mournful urban-dirge sound which immerses you in the movie beautifully. I'll swap you Burwell's In Bruges score, with that lovely curling piano melody (which I find more ironic than maudlin) for the paranoid percussion in Burn After Reading, but both are good jobs, and I still think the man can do no wrong.
Otherwise, I'm just as stumped, though I did quite like The Dark Knight also.
PS. Just looked at what Elliot Goldenthal is working on -- where are the greats when you need them? -- and he's doing both Taymor's Tempest film and Michael Mann's Public Enemies this year. We may yet forgive him for Across the Universe, then...
Yeah, one of the few things I disliked about Man on Wire is how it's constantly trying to sell the concept even after we've been sold. Some of the commentary is annoying.
I'm totally in the Up the Yangtze camp (#2 in my 2007 Top Ten). Waltz With Bashir is very different as both an Animated Feature and a Documentary, although I don't think it achieves as much in either way as it promises to.
I've been contemplating whether to watch Trouble the Water online. It was hardly on any screens here and will probably land on DVD around April. It could be even longer for Chicago 10.
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