Dan Hoffman

So in the same way that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are evil, so is Tarantino. Pulp Fiction is undoubtedly a masterpiece for its writing, its film buff intertextuality, and New Wave like innovations. But after making 100 million dollars, the world of independent cinema became a lot less independent, and it continues to be that way today.

Upon first viewing, it’s a little difficult to believe that this video for Laibach’s cover of the Opus song “Life is Life” actually played on MTV, and is not in reality some elaborate piece of sketch comedy by some unknown comedians of the ’80s. The band plays it so straight and there’s so much pomp and bombast, that we all feel the power but maybe we’re all glad when it’s over, too.

After I saw the new Mexican film We Are What We Are by Jorge Michel Grau, I left the IFC Center in a state of excitement. Sometimes a films comes along that just completely baffles me, and I think, what the hell was really going on? It’s almost as if I’m in a state of disbelief – this movie just passed before my eyes? Someone made that?

In the course cinema history, a few films end on a truly ridiculous note. These endings fly in the face of convention, and whether or not they actually resolve anything or do what an ending should do, they are just so over the top that we have to appreciate them.

When professor Brian O’Blivian says, “television is reality and reality is less than television,” it was like he was quoting from Baudrillard’s “Precession of the Simulacra”… I realized that it was really fun to theorize about Cronenberg, and I did my final presentation for the consumer culture course on Videodrome. When I showed the ending sequence to the class, they had a what the fuck kind of look on their faces.

Oshima’s sexually explicit film was banned and/or censored in many countries upon its release. Although it’s a narrative art film geared towards normal audiences, it features unsimulated sex, including blow jays and the insertion of various objects into certain orifices, among other things.

We discovered that all of Catherine’s tires were flat. This was distressing. I started to think, oh shit, I’m not going to be able to get my French homework done…I consoled Catherine, but also told her that I was nervous about school work.

Gary Numan, the enigmatic, robotic man behind the hit single “Cars” (’79), might just have been a great visionary during the ’80s and inadvertently predicted things like the internet and Facebook – in the film world, the same might be said of David Cronenberg; his films Scanners (’81) and Videodrome (’83) surely have a special spot in media theory paradise.

Ed Holms is Tim Lippe, a naïve insurance seller from a small town in Wisconsin. He’s carrying on a torrid affair with Marcy, his former school teacher. When one of his colleagues kills himself in a freak auto-erotic asphyxiation accident, Tim’s world is shattered. Not only that, his boss asks him to go to a regional insurance conference in the city of Cedar Rapids in the stead of his late co-worker.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives could easily be the one of the best movies to come out in the past five years. Like Weerasethakul’s other films, it seems to deal with the supernatural, the character of the landscape and the natural world. Not having seen it, one can tell that it’s cerebral, beautiful, and haunting. The trailer alone makes a statement. Uncle Boonmee is the work of one of the leading figures in cinema today.

In the history of the rather broad genre of music often considered folk or “singer-songwriter,” whatever that actually means, Leonard Cohen probably has one of the most fascinating and curious careers. Generally speaking, he is one of the more interesting celebrity figures for his reclusive and elusive nature that turned into a larger-than-life personality…

On the road, I thought to myself, oh shit I’m way too tired. Oh shit. I turned up the radio, opened the window. I made it ok to the parking lot and retrieved my wallet. To get home faster I pulled onto the highway. I was doing ok, I guess. Then I woke up to a loud smash; I had rear-ended an SUV. Shit shit shit I thought.