Tag: ensemble

3 Westerns I Watched This Weekend

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GOOD – Western Union (Fritz Lang 1941) This is one of Lang’s first color films. He shot it in Arizona’s Painted Desert with special attention to the natural scenery, and the three-strip Technicolor cinematography is quite beautiful to look at it, even today. It must have bowled over audiences in 1941. The surprising thing about [...]

Sydney Pollack (1934-2008) – Good Director, Great Actor

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One of the best, certainly one of the most unusual, episodes of the half-hour anthology series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, was 1960′s “The Contest for Aaron Gold.” Directed by Norman Lloyd and based on a story by Philip Roth, it’s about a camp counselor, a teacher of ceramics, who observes a special talent in Aaron (Barry [...]

Headzup – JFC Rules

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After having seen only four episodes, I’m ready to call HBO’s John From Cincinnati one of the greatest television series ever. Twin Peaks great. Deadwood great. In fact, it has the same creator/auteur as Deadwood, David Milch. Deadwood was a 19th Century Western about a McCabe and Mrs. Miller-esque mining community. John From Cincinnati is [...]

Best Performances in Films the SAG Didn’t Like

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The Screen Actors Guild has announced its nominations for 2006. Not surprisingly, the SAG tends to favor films dominated by (you guessed it) acting! And I don’t have much of a problem with the performances they decided to include. I enjoyed the ensemble acting in Bobby, The Queen, and Little Miss Sunshine as much as [...]

BOBBY – Better Than You Might Expect

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I approached Emilio Estevez’s Bobby with trepidation, knowing it was Estevez’s attempt to make an Altmanesque ensemble film, a format perfected, of course, by the late Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts) and further elaborated by P.T. Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), but rarely successful in the hands of others. Paul Haggis’s Crash, for example, is one [...]

Mixed Feelings Re For Your Consideration

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I have generally been a huge fan of Christopher Guest’s improvised ensemble comedies (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show), but For Your Consideration, a nominal satire of independent film production and its relation to Hollywood, is the weakest entry in the series to date. ON THE ONE HAND: It tells us almost nothing about show [...]

Let’s Hear It For Phoenix!

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While the rest of the blogosphere is celebrating director Robert Aldrich, I thought I’d put in a word for one of my favorite – and least discussed – Aldrich films, The Flight of the Phoenix. Not the remake, of course, but Aldrich’s great 1966 original. Phoenix is a landmark film in one of my favorite [...]