celluloid consommé

The Hiyah! exclusive gets a Blu-Ray release from Well Go USA. Yang Bingjia directs this wandering swordsman feature, which happens to be his first directorial effort. There’s a comfort of simplicity in  Eye for an Eye , and most of it rests on Tse Miu’s performance as the blind swordsman Cheng Yi. There’s a duality in how the film honors the classic swordsman saga films like  Zatoichi  and  Sleepy Eyes of Death,  but embraces a much more modern approach of its action sequences. Video Press enter or click to view image in full size Still courtesy of Well Go USA. Eye for an Eye: The Blind Swordsman  is presented in its original 2:39:1 scope aspect ratio from an MPEG AVC encoding. Many shots look luxuriously pitched in hue and its use of filters often accentuate the story’s mood, but some plainer shots can appear washed out and lose some definition. But the film is quite colorful distracting the eye after a time. Lifted darks can give way to slight banding on ...

Stained glass windows are nice to look at. They’re a medium usually associated with churches and religious institutions dominated by joyless biblical imagery. Their mosaic-like style of colored glass shards are assembled together to create an image that despite their vibrancy inspires a melancholic air of religious duty rather than how art manages to engage the senses in more positive ways. If you were to approach a documentary chronicling the making of a stained-glass window for a church, much less one that just about hits the two-hour mark, vivid enthusiasm might not be the first thing you feel before watching.  Holy Frit  shatters these preconceived notions of detached & tedious documentaries on the process of art, instead zooming in on the changing qualities of humanity during the finer points of creating something so meticulous. Justin S. Monroe directs this story of Tim Carey, an L.A. visual artist, mostly known for his painting who, in a relatively wild turn of even...

  “Why don’t you write your biography?” “Because fucking Virginia Woolf wrote my biography in 1928.” In November of 2019, Paul B. Preciado delivered a lecture at an annual psychoanalytic conference in Paris, the École de la Cause Freudienne. Entitled  Can the Monster Speak?,  the lecture builds on a combined inspiration of Franz Kafka’s  A Report to an Academy  and Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus.  Kafka’s short story details the events in which a captured monkey named Red Peter learns to behave as humans do after being caught and placed into captivity. Making literary comparisons to global issues is a strength Preciado superbly exercises, drawing parallels to what authors are saying through their works to problems that lay underneath a society that ruling classes see as comfortable and thriving, but those oppressed see as festering and dire. In  Academy,  once Red learns to communicate his thoughts verbally he speaks t...