Author Archive

Fight Club

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on October 12, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Bloody Rationalism David Fincher’s Fight Club has one significant advantage over every other cinematic thrill machine out there: it feels genuinely dangerous. Stylishly funky yet faultlessly streamlined, a strange concoction of incessant momentum, spasmodic hilarity, insinuating weirdness and, not incidentally, a brilliant, catalytic performance by Brad Pitt, this fevered fantasy touches on the most primal
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Three Kings

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on October 5, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Failing Vision An overheated, dizzying hash of a movie, David O. Russell’s Three Kings puts me in the rare position of cheering a filmmaker’s inconsistency. Which is to say: If the whole of this seriocomic plunge into Operation Desert Storm were as awful as its first 20 minutes, I might’ve been driven toward wrist-slitting, or
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The Venice Film Festival

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on September 21, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

This was, nevertheless, my first time at the Venice festival and I must say I found it a big improvement over Cannes, more leisurely and removed from the marketplace, and with a higher percentage of good films. While it offered a steady parade of stars–Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman promoting the European release of Eyes
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West Beirut

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on September 7, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Summer Hat Trick If only for Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, the summer of ’99 has ended up a noteworthy time for excitingly offbeat and inventive work from young filmmakers. Now comes Ziad Doueiri’s West Beirut, which is just as refreshing and quirkily original
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The Muse

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on September 1, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Lost in Hollywood Albert Brooks, playing a Hollywood screenwriter named Steven Phillips, is going to see Steven Spielberg to pitch a film. Pulling up to the gates of Universal City, he’s told by the guard that the pass list doesn’t grant him a “drive-on,” only a “walk-on.” He’ll have to park across the street
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The Sixth Sense Intimates Mortality

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on August 25, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Bumps in The Night The one essential thing to know in advance about supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense is what not to know: the ending. Even though I have a few things to say about the ending’s importance to the movie’s cumulative impact, and to the fact that the movie was made in the first
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Bowfinger

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on August 18, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Double Displeasure I have a theory about Steve Martin. Actually, I have two theories about him. The first is that Steve Martin is the kind of artist who is best dealt with in terms of a theory. A corollary of this theory holds that if you can have one theory about someone like Steve
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Part Two of The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on August 11, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

Part Two of The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema Sometime within the next few years–it may take a decade or more, though a nearer date is more likely–the last commercial movie theater in the U.S. to adopt digital projection will make the switch, and the medium of film will reach its effective end. Thereafter, to see actual films displayed,
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The Death of Film

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on August 4, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

The Death of Film You are standing of a summer’s day on a lovely beach, and you are doing what millions of others just out of eyeshot are doing. You are looking at the sand squiggling between your toes. You are perusing the broken shells just beyond your toes and the foamy wavelets curling against the shore nearby. You are
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Eyes Wide Shut’s Images

Written by Godfrey Cheshire on July 28, 1999. Posted in Arts & Film, Posts

The Photographer’s Final Frames Every Stanley Kubrick movie came down to an image, or a set of them, searching for two things: its own meaning and an appropriate dramatic elaboration. The fact that both searches were, in any given film, seldom entirely successful has not diminished the power of his work; in fact, it has bolstered it, especially for those
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