Archives for February 8, 2007

From The House Next Door comes word that Charles Burnett’s wondrous 1977 shoestring-budget film Killer of Sheep will be distributed to theaters for the first time ever this spring. It’s been seven or eight years since I was lucky enough to see Burnett’s haunting masterpiece, which was selected for the National Film Registry in 1990, part of its second crop of inducted titles. The film’s distributor, Milestone Films, describes it this way:

Charles Burnett

Courtesy of Our Girl, who is managing the blog in my absence, here

Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;

The white-hosed moron torturing a black

Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;

Primitivist folk masks, progressive schools;

Music in supermarkets, swimming pools;

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,

Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

Two matching takes on spring, which seems in this city, this week, impossible