<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!-- generator="WordPress/2.8.4" -->
<rss version="0.92">
<channel>
	<title>24XPS</title>
	<link>http://www.24xps.com</link>
	<description>Steve Dollar's topology of cinematic enthusiasms</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:13:08 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<docs>http://backend.userland.com/rss092</docs>
	<language>en</language>
	
	<item>
		<title>&#8216;Mother&#8217;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Kim Hye-ja’s performance as this film’s namesake is something that no one is likely to soon forget. If there’s ever a Hollywood remake (the Coen Brothers come to mind), the role would snag an Oscar nomination for any actress-of-a-certain-age who was up to the task. Kim plays Hye-ja, the mother of her small town’s contemporary version of the village idiot: an indulgent, infantile 27-year-old named Do-joon (Bon Win). Their relationship is creepy enough, epitomized in a scene where she tilts a bowl of broth to her son’s lips as he ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/03/mother/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>House: Better Than Busby Berkeley on Crack</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Movies are rarely, if ever, as whirringly rich and strange as House. The 1977 fairy-tale-as-fever-dream from Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi was the debut of a guy who was known mostly for his TV commercials, notably a popular series for the men’s cologne Mandom starring American tough guy icon Charles Bronson. Given a shot at making his first feature by a struggling studio that had nothing to lose, Obayashi did what any aspiring auteur would do: He went to his 11-year-old daughter Chigumi for ideas.
What they came up with is a ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/03/house-better-than-busby-berkeley-on-crack/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Hunger: Deep Shit</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Turner Prize-winning British artist Steve McQueen makes his feature debut with Hunger (Criterion Blu-Ray), a tough, soul-rattling film about brutality and deprivation conceived as a sensory overload. Not a bio-pic in the conventional mode, the drama takes an inside-out view of events leading to the 1981 hunger strike and death of Irish Republic Army activist Bobby Sands, and nine others, in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison. The shit-covered cell walls, the obscenely brutal beatings, even the seemingly mundane act routine of someone washing their hands, boast an acutely amplified resonance, as ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/03/hunger-deep-shit/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Yorkshire Death Trip: A Conversation with James Marsh</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Last year, he won an Oscar for best documentary, though most viewers only remember its gymnastically adept star—death-defying French wirewalker Phillipe Petit—and not James Marsh, the English director who made Man on Wire. Marsh, 46, can live with the anonymity. The success of the film, which chronicled one man’s impossible dream to walk between the towers of the World Trade Center on a highwire, redeemed his career.
Marsh’s next move wasn’t another documentary, though. It’s In the Year of Lord 1980, the middle segment of the Red Riding Trilogy, a grim ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/03/376/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>The Road + Bad Lieutenant: Going Down the Road Feeling Bad</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If this year’s Academy Awards producers are foolhardy enough, they could score the show’s customary satirical opening musical bit to R.E.M.’s Nineties anthem “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” Celebrating the post-apocalyptic jollies that destructo epics like Terminator Salvation, 2012 and The Book of Eli (due in January from the Hughes Brothers), the ceremony could acknowledge big-screen doom-and-gloom while glancing sideways at the recession and the rapid decline of studios like Miramax and the Weinstein Co.
Of course leave it to the Weinsteins ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/03/the-road-bad-lieutenant-going-down-the-road-feeling-bad/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Sweetgrass: Baby Lamb Tossing in America</title>
		<description><![CDATA[What’s all this nonsense about the “silence” of the lambs? The sheep who populate nearly every frame of Sweetgrass are bleat merchants of a spectacularly boisterous order. They may seem gentle and easily persuaded, as they cluster in a vast, moving carpet of snowy wool, kept in regimented order by attentive sheep dogs. But these hooved beasts are louder than bombs. That incessant bahhhh, in all its variations, makes a hypnotic soundtrack for this absorbed and absorbing documentary about the end of an era: The camera follows Montana rancher Lawrence ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2010/03/sweetgrass-baby-lamb-tossing-in-america/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Fantastic Fest 09: Swilling Down the Bat-Shit Crazy Syrup</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Originally published at Green Cine Daily, whose hyperlinks are left intact here.
Most film festivals are just film festivals. Fantastic Fest is a different beast. The premier American outpost on the global &#8220;fantastic cinema&#8221; circuit of festivals—devoted to all things action, horror, sci-fi and cult—FF spurts forth like a bottomless fountain of arterial spray for a week every autumn. This mutant brainchild of gonzo exhibitor Tim League and Ain&#8217;t It Cool News geek guru Harry Knowles has evolved over the past five years into a singular cinematic freak magnet.
What other major ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2009/12/fantastic-fest-swilling-down-the-bat-shit-crazy-syrup/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>The Hit: Gangster&#8217;s Rap</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
When people talk about “the British gangster film” these days, what they talk about is the post-gangster film. Not the Guy Ritchie crap, but gleefully malicious, verbally acrobatic, horrifically violent and oddly comic films like In Bruges and Sexy Beast – in which Cockney thugs disperse themselves upon the European Continent in a bid to get away from all that, only to come face to face with what they fear the most.
Newly released by Criterion, The Hit (1984) is an underappreciated gem that supplied the template for this mini-genre. Directed ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2009/12/the-hit/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>Milos Forman Pulls the Fire Alarm</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This is the extended remix of an interview that originally appeared at Stop Smiling Online.
Milos Forman answers the phone, and the hectoring cadence of MSNBC talking head Chris Matthews is audible in the background of his Connecticut home. He briefly says hello and turns down the volume.
I see you’re hooked on the political channel.
Yes.
What did you make of the elections?
Well, it was entertaining to watch, it was very interesting. It made me feel good about the whole democratic process here. Hearing so many opinions from so many sides. It was ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2009/12/milos-forman-pulls-the-fire-alarm/</link>
			</item>
	<item>
		<title>&#8216;Antichrist&#8217; + &#8216;Bronson&#8217;</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Originally published at Stop Smiling Online.
Lars von Trier has said that Antichrist was made out of the psychological tar pit of a grave depression, that it was an artistic lifeline when he felt unsure that he would ever make another film again. This could explain some of the outrageously nasty torments visited on its only characters: a historian writing a book on witchcraft (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and her psychiatrist husband (Willem Dafoe). In an opening sequence — so lushly imagined in creamy black-and-white that you’d think the fiercely ascetic von Trier ...]]></description>
		<link>http://www.24xps.com/2009/12/antichrist-bronson/</link>
			</item>
</channel>
</rss>
