Viewing posts written by: Zora Sanders
If nothing else, this year’s list confirms that we at Screen Machine are big Jesse Eisenberg fans (but then who isn’t?). It perhaps shows other continuities from our 2009 list, indicating some of the approaches and prejudices we have as film critics and spectators. We hope that the pieces we’ve written on each of the twenty films that appear here are of greater use and interest to readers than the mock-suspense of learning what finishes in which position. Returning to these films now allows us to say things about them that we couldn’t when they first appeared, and we think that these reflective pieces on the films of 2010 will offer plenty to discuss as we begin the new year.
As Mad Men kicks into its fourth season, Zora Sanders keeps up with the latest happenings on Madison Avenue circa 1964.
Exit Through The Gift Shop, the first film outing from Banksy, mercifully doesn’t get bogged down in self consciously asking the question, “What Is Art?”. Rather, the film is full of the addictive thrill of making art that is public, dangerous and of course illegal.
Judging by Jacques Audiard’s most recent film, French prison is no joke. Or if it is, it’s not the funny-ha-ha kind and the punch line is probably ‘dead babies’.
There’s a line in Down and Out in Paris and London where Orwell describes a friend of his as “the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike him”. I think the Coen brothers would like that a lot. (Incidentally, there’s an interesting debate out there about whether or not Orwell was an anti-Semite. Consensus seems to be heading towards, yes, probably, a bit.)
Not that A Serious Man is atheistic exactly. You get the…
