So begins the first dialogue in Gerry, a full nine minutes into the film, as the two Gerrys ditch the trail and instead head out into the desert itself. Which is to say, life itself. Maybe. Probably. The thing that awaits us all at the end of the trail, so to speak. A finality. No matter your attempts to put it off, to detour yourself, to meander and wander, you’ll still end up there, at the same final exit that one of the Gerrys ends up. In a new series curated by Nicholas Rombes, writers ...| 3:AM Magazine
She’s not concerned with how she looks. This is no cautionary tale about vanity or performative femininity. Something else is happening here. Our girl is not looking to be told she’s cute. And whatever she’s looking for, I sense, she’s not so sure she wants to find it. Her eyes are searching, pleading, unguardedly expressive — in other words, they are heartbreaking. By Lindsay Lerman.| 3:AM Magazine
Turner, to the contrary, is no drone. His musical theme is jazzy, spontaneous; it clashes with the static-like white noise of the computer’s scanning device, its spinning tape reels and nonstop dot-matrix printing. Forever late to work, Turner prefers — like Bartleby the Scrivener — not to become a smoothly functioning cog in a mechanism that he perceives as alienating. Across a New York City whose streets are dominated by hulking cars and trucks he rides a Solex, the French motorized b...| 3:AM Magazine
It's interesting because there are moments in this film I find physically painful to watch. There’s a moment when Hoffman’s character is putting together this massive production in a warehouse the size of the city and it becomes so introspective that I can hardly bear to look at it. I think I chose Synecdoche for a piece of criticism like this because I knew it wouldn’t mean I’d have to watch the entire film again, and I don’t know what that says about me or about the work, to be si...| 3:AM Magazine
The first five minutes bring us into the world of the archetypal white supremacist — the one who basks in eugenics, the one who is filled with rage, the one who spews hate with a ferocity that is only matched by a perverse delight. But by minute 6, the scene shifts to a different figure, the ordinary racist, in a place where racism isn’t dressed in white robes, where it subtly, but no less insidiously, finds its way into institutions — like the police — that are deemed respectable by ...| 3:AM Magazine
If the patriarchy defines the rules of the society in which the narrative is set, however, then it sits on the periphery. The focus, instead, is on how desire builds and is felt, as Marianne and Héloïse become lovers. The relationships in the film that are defined by power, ownership and oppression, are the antithesis of the one formed between Marianne and Héloïse. As the latter begins to paint the former we see an affair born between equals. And, tellingly for a film that is about the re...| 3:AM Magazine
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen Performance. I’d seen it thirteen times before 1976. No matter to which strata of the sclerotic British class structure you belonged in the early seventies, you were woven into the social fabric by the music you absorbed, the books you read, the bands you saw, the squats or rentals where you lived, your connections to the hardcore criminality of the drug scene that fuelled the sixties/seventies outsider culture. By Des Barry.| 3:AM Magazine
