Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

May 2006 activity

Total Log Entries: 54

Total Comments: 16

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The Damned / La caduta degli dei / Italy / Switzerland / W. Germany / 1969

It seems amazing now to think that The Damned’s Night of the Long Knives sequence was once considered a tour de force of cinema. For all Visconti’s overt intentions at indicting German business’s guilty and doomed involvement in Nazism, this film ends up as little more – but so long! – than an exercise in Nazi chic. The expressionist touches are great – the pools of dark blue light on Bogarde in bed, the greenish light illuminating Ingrid Thulin’s face – but too often this veers too close to being simply bad.

by Ian Johnston | Source: WB DVD
23 May 2006 12:59 PM | Comments (1)

Comments / 1 total / Submit Comment

  1. Austin Burbridge / 23 May 2006 / 6:07 PM / URL

    Part of the drama of this artistic creation is seeing how very close the filmmaker skirts disaster — and anyway, is lurid really the same thing as bad?

    The real failures are those films which treat the Nazis with tasteful decorum. If you cannot paint these damned characters with green light, why have a green light at all?

    This recalls David Cronenberg’s CRASH — it is tasteful at precisely the moment when its story demands that good taste be violated

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