Word: wexler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Forster gets three beautiful girls in the course of the film, including one long run-around-the-apartment. hand-held-camera, both-of-them-completely-nude ("This picture is rated X") scenc. Haskell Wexler's (the producer and director) point must be that Forster's life is all highlights the way his work is. But that isn't very belivable either...
...other hand, Wexler wanted his movie to be a statement about media rather than personalities. And he does maintain throughout the film an impressive feeling for the kind of electric coldness that media fascination always leaves with...
...viewer participates with the picture and fills in, on his own, much of what he experiences. This kind of filling-in is supposed to give the viewer a false sense of what really happened at the so-called news event. Therefore television reporting is largely a lie. But because Wexler never goes into the viewer end of media (McLuhan's work). his point isn't particularly profound. We all know that TV newsmen fudge reality to the point where every night's news looks the same no matter what's happening...
...Some of Wexler's techniques are a drag for his own medium of film. In one of the opening scenes he has his ideas about news coverage batted around in a cocktail party. A real bad gimmick. When the characters speak, they are making statements to the audience of the movie not to each other. A film should always make sense within itself...
MEDIUM COOL is the most impassioned and impressive film released so far this year. Writer-Director-Cinematographer Haskell Wexler's loose narrative about a TV cameraman during last summer's Chicago convention fuses documentary and narrative techniques into a vivid portrait of a nation in conflict...