It's Pete's Blog
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…
Jeeze, what a way to follow up “Get Out” and “A Man Escaped.” The former of those two, in which a young Black man is lured to the home of a wealthy white couple under false pretenses with horrific results, is a commentary on the fraught racial politics of its time. The latter is a…