Scraps on Cinema

Between May, 1978 and April, 1995, a man named Theodore John Kaczynski perpetrated a series of domestic bombings that killed three individuals and injured 23 others. His targets tended to be locations or individuals identified with airline companies and universities. This earned him the FBI identifier UNABOM or "University and Airline Bomber"; and, thus, the media supervillain alter-ego, "Unabomber." A child prodigy when it came to mathematics and a social maladroit when it came to virtually everything else, the disillusioned Kaczynski suddenly resigned from his assistant professorship at U.C. Berkley's Department of Mathematics in the summer of 1969 at the age of 25. Within two years he was living a subsistence life out of a cabin that he and his older brother David built in the mountains of the unincorporated community of Lincoln, Montana, making ends meet by doing odd jobs, but mostly living parasitically off his family. From the physical and emotional privat

Somewhere along the trenches of the Western Front of the First World War, Captain Edward Laurent leads his gas-choked regiment into a hail of German machine gun fire. Sustaining three shots to the abdomen, Edward lies dying on a stretcher in a Red Cross tent, only for his surgeon to discover something unusual: a fourth bullet, a silver one, lodged deep in his chest. Receiving news of Edward's death, his older sister Charlotte remembers the end of their childhood and the death of their innocence. The scene changes to a "wild goose" Irish settlement in the rural parts of western France in the late-19th century. Charlotte and Edward (Amelia Crouch and Max Mackintosh) are the children of Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie), the baron of the commune. When a clan of Romani people moves into the area, staking an apparently legal ancestral claim to the territory, Seamus and the rest of the settlement fathers hire a gang of mercenaries to massacre them all. Not only are all the "

Everything hits differently when viewed on a big screen versus a small one. Even then, the opening to Shaft  hits really  differently - more so if, instead of a restored digital presentation, the film is projected from a raw, scratched-up 35mm print, as it was this Thursday at the venerable Philadelphia Film Center for a one-night engagement. Shaft begins with director Gordon Parks and cinematographer Urs Furrer's bird's-eye camera view of Times Square. With only the ambience of Midtown traffic underneath, we tilt down and zoom in, cutting away from our sightline up 7th and Broadway to a new vantage of the "Forty Deuce," 42nd Street's now long defunct row of walk-in grindhouses playing double features ranging from star-studded Westerns to bargain-bin sexploitation flicks. As Isaac Hayes's iconic theme kicks in and the title comes up in bold red letters, the titular private detective John Shaft (Richard Roundtree) emerges from the subway, crosses 7th, and makes

Premiering on October 1, 2000, the MTV prank and stunt show Jackass  became an overnight success at a time when extreme sports had reached a pivotal point of transition from the alternative undergrounds of Generation X to the mainstream of millennial youth culture. Back then, the ESPN X Games had only been around for about five years, taking skateboarding, freestyle motorcross, and snowboarding out of niche regional circuits of competition and giving them their own Olympics, with the top talents of the day and their athletic achievements now legitimized by the branding of major corporate sponsorship. Only a year before the premiere of Jackass , Activision's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater  brought the same legitimization to the extreme sports video game, centering their appeal not merely on racking up points for performing tricks in novel virtual environments replete with graffiti and dominated by punk and alt-metal soundtracks, but rather the ability to play as real-life professional a