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Saturday, May 24, 2008

New Reviews for 5/24

posted by on May 24 at 11:30 AM

Since our guide came out Thursday, we’ve posted three new reviews.

Dream Boy. Ryan S. Jackson writes, “Clumsy and clichéd from start to finish, this is one to miss.”

The experimental film Loos Ornamental, which Jen Graves has endowed with the coveted “Don’t Miss!” tag:

Loos Ornamental

First come a few words in German, and then there are no words at all, only images of Adolf Loos’s architecture, arranged in a chronological slide show of long-held video stills inside and outside the buildings, mainly in Vienna. Loos famously eschewed ornament, reducing form to function by exposing beams, stacking grids, and letting materials express their own conditions. This makes for some genteel moments, but there’s also the return of the repressed, in perfectly flat and geometric surfaces that nonetheless roar like baroque sculpture because they are made of wildly mottled red or green marble. Drunk on the dream of modernism, you reach the end of the film, where there’s only a cube gravestone with the architect’s name on it. It’s right in the city, and a train passes close behind it. JEN GRAVES

And I review Marie Losier’s Portraits in Cinema, a program of biographical shorts about filmmakers and other eccentric personalities: “The first, about filmmaker/composer Tony Conrad, was made over a longer period than the others, and it shows. As he performs a little sped-up chicken dance or pickles curly garlands of film stock, Conrad narrates the story of his youth and influences, including early roommate and collaborator Jack Smith. It’s delightful.” I didn’t know it going in, but occasional Stranger contributor Brian L. Frye did camera for some of the films in the program.

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What I like about Loos, is that he didn't hate wood and try to treat it like metal, and that makes him special for me among the moderns.

Posted by cracked | May 25, 2008 11:07 PM

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