Blogcritics Author: Dan Schneider

DVD Review: High And Low

Dan Schneider — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:39:38 EDT

A reissued masterpiece by Akira Kurosawa scores high in the Criterion Collection pantheon.
While most well known for his classic Japanese period dramas, such as Seven Samurai, Rashomon, and Throne Of Blood, the fact is that director Akira Kurosawa’s lasting legacy will be sustained by his towering achievements in then contemporary Japanese drama -- films such as Ikiru, The Bad Sleep Well, and 1963’s black and white crime...

DVD Review: Vampyr

Dan Schneider — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 07:00:50 EDT

Carl Theodor Dreyer's horror classic gets the treatment from the Criterion Collection folks, and it's a winner!
The Criterion Collection will shortly be releasing a two-disk version of the 1932 black and white classic horror film by Carl Theodor Dreyer, Vampyr. I first watched this film about twenty years ago, on a VHS release, and, unlike many others, immediately recognized it as a supernal piece of cinema. Then, I did not have the critical knowledge to...

DVD Review: Rescue Dawn

Dan Schneider — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:50:00 EDT

Werner Herzog's triumphant return to fictive filmmaking in over a decade.
It’s been quite a few years since Werner Herzog did a major fictive film. The last couple of decades has seen an increasing veer into documentaries and more experimental cinema. However, with the 2007 film, Rescue Dawn, Herzog shows that the years have not taken their all too inexorable toll on the visionary mind. While the film is not an...

Movie Review: The Chronicles Of Narnia - Prince Caspian

Dan Schneider — Thu, 22 May 2008 22:12:42 EDT

A disappointing sequel that suffers from too many familiar Hollywood ills.
One of the major problems with all film series is what might be called middle filmitis. This is when films that are not first in a series rely too heavily upon an audience's memories of earlier films to inform them of the traits of characters, the chronology of prior events, and a general knowledge of the world the film series is set in. Such...

DVD Review: Autumn Sonata

Dan Schneider — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:41:53 EDT

Ingmar Bergman's oddly neglected chamber piece is the work of a master.
Ingmar Bergman’s almost fated 1978 filmic teaming with Ingrid Bergman, Autumn Sonata (Höstsonaten), is amongst the very best of the films in his canon. It is also the most emotionally intense of the series of Strindbergian or Chekhovian chamber dramas he has filmed over the years, which includes his Spider Trilogy (Through A Glass...

Book Review: The Philosopher At The End Of The Universe by Mark Rowlands

Dan Schneider — Thu, 8 May 2008 13:20:17 EDT

A romp through sci fi films to get at the deeper questions that propel them.
Most books on philosophy are a bore because a) unlike art, which is ideas in motion, philosophy is merely ideas (no matter how wonderful or complex they may be), and b) most philosophers (who claim that title in primacy) are simply bad writers -- the two most notable exceptions to that rule being Plato and Friedrich Nietszche. And one of the...

Book Review: Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock

Dan Schneider — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:57:54 EDT

A collection of short stories on losers that is written the way a loser would....
One of the most reliable tipoffs to the fact of a writer’s not being of high quality is when he is overpraised, and overpraised in a way that stresses nothing of a literary nature, usually by a published writer who lacks any skills of his own. Such was reinforced to me upon reading the new collection of short stories by first time writer...

Book Review: The Race Card -- How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse by Richard Thompson Ford

Dan Schneider — Thu, 3 Apr 2008 15:50:15 EDT

A Stanford law professor pens a classic on how to approach racism in a world where the very notion is pass�.
In reading Richard Thompson Ford's The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse, I was put in mind of one of William Shakespeare's most quoted bon mots. To paraphrase: Kill all the social psychologists! This came to mind precisely because most books penned on race relations in this country are written by social...

Book Review: The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo

Dan Schneider — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:34:17 EDT

The man who ran the Sanford Prison Experiment shows how evil is not just a thing within the individual.
Everyone has their biases, but the thing that distinguishes a real intellectual from a phony is recognizing the bias and moving on. This thought struck me as I read social psychologist Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect. Immediately I thought of the book The Lucifer Principle, by Howard Bloom, a man I’d interviewed a...

Book Review: Tabloid Dreams by Robert Olen Butler

Dan Schneider — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:50:23 EDT

Pulitzer Prize-winner loses touch and becomes third-rate pulp fiction hack.
After winning a Pulitzer Prize for his 1992 short story collection of Vietnam-based stories, A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler followed it up with a collection of a dozen tales, Tabloid Dreams, based upon the sort of headlines ripped from the tabloid weekly newspapers one finds on checkout lines. After a lackluster career...