Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · TV & Streaming
Fred’s on TV! But You Can’t See Him, Except on YouTube
Read about what you can’t see
Author: Alan Vanneman
Alan Vanneman is a writer living in Washington, DC. He is the author of two dead-tree novels, Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra and Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara, both published by Penzler Press. Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara is available as an audiobook from Blackstone/Downpour. He is also the author of three new Nero Wolfe novellas recreating Rex Stout’s famous fat detective, a FREE ebook, and Author! Author! Auden, Oates, and Updike, a collection of two short stories and a novella, available both as an ebook and print on demand. All of his fiction can be accessed here at his blog Literature R Us. Portions of his article "Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone," which originally appeared online in Bright Lights, have been included in a textbook anthology by Allison Smith, Trixie Smith, and Stacia Watkins.
Actors & Personalities · Reviews · Westerns
Carl Foreman’s and Fred Zinneman’s High Noon: Kelly versus Jurado! The Ultimate Face-Off!
O to be torn, ‘twixt love and duty
Straight arrow? Not Exactly. Jennifer Lawrence in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games
Why do lesbians have to be so boring?
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Nothin’ but Legs! Fred and Cyd Go out Kicking in Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings
Sorry, folks, but this is the last dance
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Funny Face! Audrey Hepburn’s Fabulous Fifties Fashion Frolic! Also Starring Fred Astaire
Paris! Gershwin! Been there! Heard that!
There’s a Holdup in the Bronx, Brooklyn’s Broken out in Fights — but Who Gives a Damn? Joe E. Ross and Fred Gwynne, not as funny as I remembered them in Nat Hiken’s Car 54, Where Are You?
You can go home again; it’s just not a lot of fun when you get there
You Had Me at “Farrier”! Matt Thompson and Adam Reed Supply Cheap Thrills for the Socially Challenged in Archer
Like a straight, poorly drawn, less fluid Ambiguously Gay Duo
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Yeah, I’m 56 and She’s 24. What’s Your Point? Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, frequently though not continuously irresistible in Daddy Long Legs
Come on, do the Sluefoot? That I can resist.
Jew or No Jew? David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin tell the story of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in The Social Network
Hotasianchicks.com/aaronsorkinssweatyfantasies.html
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Looking at Charlie – Monsieur Verdoux: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“What’s all this about good and evil?” With the release of The Great Dictator late in 1940, Charlie Chaplin had done it again. He had made a movie that, with[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
A Few Steps Shy of a Masterpiece: Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse Apply Themselves in The Band Wagon
“She came at me in sections . . . she was bad . . . she was dangerous . . . she was my kind of woman.”
Sex and the City: The Way We Were, the Way We Fucked: Carrie and Her Crew Party Like It’s 1999!
They can never really knock you off your feet as long as you’re wearing Blahniks
Fifty plus Fifty: The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood Reconsidered: The Sorrows of Ezra, as Told by Himself
He worked for Time; that can do things to a man
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · War
Looking at Charlie: The Great Dictator: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke it is written, the kingdom of Godis within man, not one man or a group of men but in all men.”
Documentaries · Reviews · Writers & Critics
“Riveting”* — Not! Gerald Peary’s For the Love of Movies — The Story of American Film Criticism
Talking heads, talking of talking heads
Book review: Chaplin, by Simon Louvish
Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey, by Simon Louvish. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2009. Hardcover. $27.99. 412pp. ISBN 987-0-312-58169-5. Do we really need another book about Charlie Chaplin?[…]
Book review: The Moment of Psycho, by David Thomson
The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, by David Thomson. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Hardcover. $22.95. 183pp. ISBN 978-0-465-00339-6. Feeling a little psycho these[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Fred Astaire, Two Steps Forward and One Step Back: Fred and Vera-Ellen, Not Quite Walking on Air in The Belle of New York
Can quantity trump quality? Not so much
Links + BSA
