Comedy is a funny thing. Just as no philosopher has ever been able to reach a definition of "art" that wasn't immediately challenged and exposed as insufficient by another philosopher five seconds later, no universally successful attempt has yet been made to take stock of what makes humans laugh, how that can be achieved through media, and what the rules for said media might be. We're still, by all accounts, making sense of the social phenomenon of laughter. And yet, no one needs to have read Terry Eagleton's "Humor" to understand when something is funny and react accordingly. There's something just ineffably, atavistically immediate about good comedy -- something that could still be enduring 1,000 years into the future.
Such is the appeal of most futuristic sci-fi comedy, but especially so of "Futurama," arguably its greatest 21st-century exponent. The Matt Groening-created animated sitcom managed to get seven great seasons...
Such is the appeal of most futuristic sci-fi comedy, but especially so of "Futurama," arguably its greatest 21st-century exponent. The Matt Groening-created animated sitcom managed to get seven great seasons...
- 6/3/2023
- by Leo Noboru Lima
- Slash Film
From new voices like NoViolet Bulawayo to rediscovered old voices like James Salter, from Dave Eggers's satire to David Thomson's history of film, writers, Observer critics and others pick their favourite reads of 2013. And they tell us what they hope to find under the tree …
Curtis Sittenfeld
Novelist
My favourite books of 2013 are Drama High (Riverhead) by Michael Sokolove, Sea Creatures (Turnaround) by Susanna Daniel, and & Sons (Harper Collins) by David Gilbert. Drama High is incredibly smart, moving non-fiction about an American drama teacher who for four decades coaxed sophisticated and nuanced theatrical performances out of teenage students who weren't privileged or otherwise remarkable and in so doing, changed their conceptions of what they could do with their lives. Sea Creatures is a gripping, beautifully written novel about the mother of a selectively mute three-year-old boy; when she takes a job ferrying supplies to a hermit off the coast of Florida,...
Curtis Sittenfeld
Novelist
My favourite books of 2013 are Drama High (Riverhead) by Michael Sokolove, Sea Creatures (Turnaround) by Susanna Daniel, and & Sons (Harper Collins) by David Gilbert. Drama High is incredibly smart, moving non-fiction about an American drama teacher who for four decades coaxed sophisticated and nuanced theatrical performances out of teenage students who weren't privileged or otherwise remarkable and in so doing, changed their conceptions of what they could do with their lives. Sea Creatures is a gripping, beautifully written novel about the mother of a selectively mute three-year-old boy; when she takes a job ferrying supplies to a hermit off the coast of Florida,...
- 11/24/2013
- by Ali Smith, Robert McCrum, Tim Adams, Kate Kellaway, Rachel Cooke, Sebastian Faulks, Jackie Kay
- The Guardian - Film News
In Reason, Faith, and Revolution, Terry Eagleton calls God Is Not Great “stylish, entertaining, splendidly impassioned, [and] compulsively readable.” But he also shows how shallow Hitchens’s conception of religion is, and how feeble a straw man he set up for himself. (Eagleton includes Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Daniel C. Dennett’s Breaking the Spell in his indictment; he refers to the whole crowd as Ditchkins for rhetorical purposes.)...
- 1/16/2012
- Pastemagazine.com
You suggested we ask Kieslowski scholar Nicholas Reyland to tell us what to listen out for while watching Krzysztof Kieslowski's trilogy. Here, he offers a rhapsody in Blue (and White and Red)
• You can already stream the Three Colours trilogy on our site; join us from 7pm this Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, when we'll be liveblogging the films, and enter our competition for a chance to feed into Peter Bradshaw's blog for Three Colours Red on the final evening
The Three Colours Trilogy marked the culmination a decade of collaborations between director Krzysztof Kieslowski and composer Zbigniew Preisner. Their film work is characterised by musical moments which illuminate the story and open up channels of interpretation between the work and the audience. These are cinematic narratives – as Stanley Kubrick once said of Kieslowski's The Decalogue – which dramatise ideas, rather than merely talk about them. Preisner's music is central to that process.
• You can already stream the Three Colours trilogy on our site; join us from 7pm this Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, when we'll be liveblogging the films, and enter our competition for a chance to feed into Peter Bradshaw's blog for Three Colours Red on the final evening
The Three Colours Trilogy marked the culmination a decade of collaborations between director Krzysztof Kieslowski and composer Zbigniew Preisner. Their film work is characterised by musical moments which illuminate the story and open up channels of interpretation between the work and the audience. These are cinematic narratives – as Stanley Kubrick once said of Kieslowski's The Decalogue – which dramatise ideas, rather than merely talk about them. Preisner's music is central to that process.
- 11/14/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
Vampires are hot. So are gangsta rappers. Actors often say that villains are more fun to portray... and from the audience’s perspective, villains are often more fun to watch than heroes. Even our slang glorifies evil: “Bad” and “wicked,” in some contexts, actually mean “good” and “cool.” Terry Eagleton at Tikkun (via Alternet) explores some ideas about why this may be so, even though in our culture once, long ago, it was the other way around: Whatever happened, then, to this ancient notion of goodness as exciting, energetic, and exhilarating, and evil as empty, boring, and banal? Why do people now see things the other way round? One answer, at least in the West, is the gradual rise of the middle classes. As the middle classes came to exert their clammy grip on Western civilization, there was a gradual redefinition of virtue. Virtue now came to mean not energy and exuberance but prudence,...
- 3/19/2011
- by MaryAnn Johanson
- www.flickfilosopher.com
The thing, itself: I bow to no one in my admiration for the wit and persipicacity of the film critic Dennis Lim, but I have to admit that every now and then he shows a tendency—one might call it "monklike," or maybe not—towards eyeball-roll-inducing pronouncements. In a recent Los Angeles Times review of The Criterion Collection's new DVD of Marco Ferreri's 1969 Dillinger Is Dead, he makes much of the film's Marcuse-inflected political content, and ends his notice ruefully: "Present-day viewers of 'Dillinger Is Dead' are likely to respond less to its overly literal satire than to its riot of colors, its Pop Art flair, its modernist design. In other words, a furious attack on capitalist society lives on, ironically, as a consumer fetish object."
"What incredible irony!" as one of those kids on South Park would say. "Oh, please," is what I said, as I've always believed that,...
"What incredible irony!" as one of those kids on South Park would say. "Oh, please," is what I said, as I've always believed that,...
- 5/7/2010
- MUBI
The thing, itself: I bow to no one in my admiration for the wit and persipicacity of the film critic Dennis Lim, but I have to admit that every now and then he shows a tendency—one might call it "monklike," or maybe not—towards eyeball-roll-inducing pronouncements. In a recent Los Angeles Times review of The Criterion Collection's new DVD of Marco Ferreri's 1969 Dillinger Is Dead, he makes much of the film's Marcuse-inflected political content, and ends his notice ruefully: "Present-day viewers of 'Dillinger Is Dead' are likely to respond less to its overly literal satire than to its riot of colors, its Pop Art flair, its modernist design. In other words, a furious attack on capitalist society lives on, ironically, as a consumer fetish object."
"What incredible irony!" as one of those kids on South Park would say. "Oh, please," is what I said, as I've always believed that,...
"What incredible irony!" as one of those kids on South Park would say. "Oh, please," is what I said, as I've always believed that,...
- 5/7/2010
- MUBI
When you think of Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, you remember his sci-fi movies, violence on an epic scale and sex. Lots of sex. You wouldn’t really associate him with Jesus of Nazareth, would you? Although, Robocop does have allusions to the resurrection drama.
He’s annoyed plenty of people in his career including lesbians, feminists, film critics and cinema-going public, but now he’ll probably have Christians in a rage with his plans for a book and film on the life of Jesus. But don’t be so quick to judge!
Verhoeven has actually been obsessed with the mythical figure of Jesus for a very long time. The academic turned director plans on writing a book about Jesus, which hopes to turn into a movie. Would it take on Mel Gibson’s romantic horror flick, The Passion of the Christ? Don’t count on it. Verhoeven told MTV:
“The...
He’s annoyed plenty of people in his career including lesbians, feminists, film critics and cinema-going public, but now he’ll probably have Christians in a rage with his plans for a book and film on the life of Jesus. But don’t be so quick to judge!
Verhoeven has actually been obsessed with the mythical figure of Jesus for a very long time. The academic turned director plans on writing a book about Jesus, which hopes to turn into a movie. Would it take on Mel Gibson’s romantic horror flick, The Passion of the Christ? Don’t count on it. Verhoeven told MTV:
“The...
- 4/13/2010
- by Martyn Conterio
- FilmShaft.com
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.