Word: cinema
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...volcanic new film that will make those who missed the festival feel as if they were there. Those who actually were there will see it even more intimately. But Woodstock is far more than a sound-and-light souvenir of a long weekend concert. Purely as a piece of cinema, it is one of the finest documentaries ever made in the U.S. ... It is no small tribute to [director Michael] Wadleigh's dexterity that the film's three-hour running time passes with the mesmerizing speed of a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo ... Woodstock's most obvious attraction is the music...
...Fingers, was, as Toback describes it, “defiled, defamed and rejected except by a handful.” That “handful,” however, included famed critics David Thompson and Pauline Kael, and the film is now regarded as an American cinema classic...
What is perhaps most striking about Toback’s cinematic repertoire is that he has always stayed on the fringes of commercial cinema. Though he describes his relationship with Hollywood as a “mutual resistance,” the closest he has come to personal involvement in a major Hollywood production in the last fifteen years was writing the screenplay for Barry Levinson’s Bugsy...
Starting his cinematic work in the 1970s during a period of American cinema in which experimentation was highly valued (primarily due to the steady economic breakdown of Hollywood in the ’50s and ’60s), Toback sees the Hollywood of today as a kind of dead space in which filmmakers are always pushed to “shoot for the middle.” He sees dealing honestly with adverse topics a near impossibility in the mainstream cinematic landscape...
Toback may seem overzealous in his denouncement of the tenets of Hollywood cinema, but, nonetheless, it’s difficult to deny that very few mainstream directors could pull off not only the sexual content, but also some of the visual and especially sonic experimentation of When Will I Be Loved in a studio setting. This is to say nothing of his earlier films, particularly considering that his latest is actually more digestible than more intense offerings like 1999’s racially charged drama Black and White...