Ron Stringer

UCLA Festival 2007

Ron Stringer
As in past years, the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television’s eight-day presentation of creative work by students both graduate and undergraduate includes five evening screenings — one of them given entirely to animation — of short films, a Writers Guild–sponsored program of readings from new work by screenwriting......
American Zombie

VC Filmfest 2007

Ron Stringer
{mosimage} Grace Lee’s American Zombie, the centerpiece presentation in this 23rd edition of the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (a.k.a. VC Filmfest), is a purported documentary about L.A.’s substantial, if largely closeted, community of the undead. In her translation of the Christopher Guest–ian comedy of manners into bone-nicking Swiftian......
Arctic Son

All Roads Film Festival

Ron Stringer
“It’s a nice place to live . . . if you’re looking for a nice place to live,” Stanley Sr. tells Stanley Jr., a young alcoholic sketch artist who’s hit bottom in the big city. Senior is talking about Old Crow, Manitoba, a dry-by-law Arctic settlement near the Alaskan border, and his......
Wormholes

Calarts in Moving Pictures: A Mini Tribute

Ron Stringer
Since its establishment in 1971 at the Disney-endowed California Institute of the Arts, the School of Film and Video has cultivated a hands-on, experimental, interdisciplinary approach to filmmaking whose undergraduate and graduate practitioners have gone on to exert an enlivening, eccentric and even subversive influence on the look, sound and......

The Gorilla Inside Me

Ron Stringer
Although I’ve tended to link my lifelong obsession with the movies to a father-son bond formed over weekend and vacation double bills at the Thalia on West 95th Street, or down on Times Square, it was actually my grandmother, back in the suburbs of Camden, New Jersey — where I......
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Pages of Glory

Ron Stringer
When I read, on March 7, 1999, that Stanley Kubrick had died of heart failure the day before, at age 70, just four months (as it turned out) before the release of his last picture, the words that popped into my head — and surprised me sufficiently that a moment......

Film Editor's Choice

Ron Stringer
Photo by Philippe Antonello 10 BEST (in alphabetical order) The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi (Takeshi Kitano, Japan) Collateral (Michael Mann, U.S.) Dogville (Lars von Trier, Denmark) Enduring Love (Roger Michell, U.K.) The Five Obstructions (Jorgen Leth/Lars von Trier, Denmark) The Incredibles (Brad Bird, U.S.) Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, U.S.) The......

Becky, We Hardly Knew Ye

Ron Stringer
Photo by Frank Connor In the last but two of the more than 200 illustrations inked, circa 1847, by Punch humorist William Makepeace Thackeray for the 19 monthly installments of his novel Vanity Fair, the cowardly Jos Sedley pleads with Colonel William Dobbin — the only one of his characters......

Taking the Bait

Ron Stringer
Leave-him-to-television director D.J. Caruso’s second feature (after The Salton Sea) — about the tracking of a serial killer whose M.O. involves literally defacing his victims, assuming their identities and scaring the bejeezus out of Ethan Hawke — contains one good scene at the very beginning and, later on, a decent......

Fire and Tarnation

Ron Stringer
PARK CITY, UTAH — For those of us whose bliss (and profession) it is to succumb again and again to the obsessive-compulsive disorder we’ve come to designate, a shade too self-congratulatorily, as “movie love,” film festivals are where we find our most intense (if ephemeral) satisfaction for our peculiar illicit......