It's Pete's Blog
How far would you go for success? How far is too far? In Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Ugestsu,” two families in feudal Japan are destroyed by the greed and ambition of man — with women paying the true price. With the countryside gripped by civil war, rural villagers Genjūrō and Miyagi manage to make a tidy sum…
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. … The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that…
Louise (Danielle Darrieux), a wealthy Parisian aristocrat desperately and secretly in debt, sells the diamond earrings her husband, André (Charles Boyer), a famed general, gave her as a wedding gift. Following an amusing and cleverly plotted series of lies and revelations, the earrings come back into André’s possession — he knows she sold them and…
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Tropical Malady” is utterly strange, the first movie I can remember in quite a while that I started again from the beginning immediately after finishing. The film begins as a meandering contemporary romance between a young Thai solider named Keng and a naive farm boy named Tong. Then, about halfway in, the narrative…
I have to admit, I’ve never been much of a Western guy. In college, I watched (and really enjoyed) “High Noon” and “Unforgiven” for a class on masculinity in film. (Aside: Here’s a paper I wrote contrasting the two for that class [PDF]. I haven’t read it in well over a decade, but I just…