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.

August 2006 activity

Total Log Entries: 61

Total Comments: 60

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Caché / Hidden / France / Austria / Germany / Italy / 2005

Every time I watch this film it has me physically and mentally reeling for days. But oddly I never have much that I want to vocalize or write about it. On the one hand, this is because I’m loathe to reveal even the slightest detail to those who haven’t seen the film (so stop reading, you); and on the other hand, it’s because I find the film so perfect, almost clinically so, in its form, philosophy, and ontology that it barely needs commentary. This won’t stop others from endless (and largely pointless, in my opinion) whodunit conjecture, attempting to find a physically or psychologically realist interpretation of the film, or attempts to extrapolate an anti-American moral from the film’s more contemporary subject matter. But this is the mark of a film, like the very best of Hitchcock, that marries both high- and low-brows in the compulsively watchable format of the thriller, complete with pitch-black humor and a playful back-and-forth between empathy and the deepest cynicism.

What’s most surprising from the DVD release is that Haneke, who answered one out of every five questions at last year’s New York Film Festival, is positively chatty in the DVD extras. Of course, most of what he explains is that there is nothing to explain.

Full review.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Sony Pictures DVD
02 Aug 2006 4:07 PM | Submit Comment

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