Dixiana on DVD: Has Everything but Bill Robinson’s Feet
Where’s the rest of him? Why, Roan Group Archival Entertainment, why? Why did you go to the trouble of restoring the thoroughly lame 1930 musical Dixiana and then fail to[…]
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 · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Fred and Ginger Miss a Step in Shall We Dance
“Let’s call the whole thing off?” Shall We Dance (1937) is the last and least of the great Fred & Ginger musicals, saved from ignominy by a superb score courtesy[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · Reviews
Bob Dylan in D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967)
The dude with the ‘tude “If Bob Dylan is a poet, so is Cassius Clay.” So sneered Norman Mailer in 1965, before he realized what the sixties were about, and[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Brad and Julia Go South in The Mexican
Julia Roberts has pits! Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts are two of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Each has an annual income that oscillates comfortably from $20 million to $70[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Feedback from the Global Village: Culture Docs
From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China offers three documentaries for the price of one; Genghis Blues is too shaggy for words The collapse of Cold War rigidities and[…]
Life Is Shit – Let’s Put on a Show! Stephen Sondheim’s Company on DVD
“I guess it all works if you revere Stephen Sondheim.” Have you been kicking yourself ever since May 3, 1970, when you weren’t there for the marathon recording session that[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Fred and Ginger Savor La Belle Romance in Swing Time
“Shall we take it straight through?” Swing Time is the last Fred & Ginger musical to have it all – lots of great songs from Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields,[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Too Haute to Handle: Jazz on a Summer’s Day (1959)
The best jazz documentary just got better Turn a fashion photographer loose on the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958, and what do you get? Lots of artsy-fartsy shots of sea,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Writers & Critics
Manhattan to America: Drop Dead! The New Yorker Takes a Slap at Julia Roberts
“The more he writes about Julia, the madder Tony gets.” One thing the American people do not need in their lives is more stress. They do not need some tea-sipping,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Fred and Ginger Get Their Feet Wet in Follow the Fleet
There may be trouble ahead.” Follow the Fleet is perhaps the most problematic film in the Astaire/Rogers series. It has an excruciatingly bad plot; it has a singularly lame performance[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Fred and Ginger Hit Their Highest Peak in Top Hat
What’s black and white and simply reeks with class? Top Hat is the apotheosis of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It has five dances, a total they matched in only[…]
The Fabulous Baker Boys Explains Why There’s No People Like Show People
Damn we’re good. With the single exception of biting the heads off of rats, lounge acts are the lowest form of show business. As such, they exert a perverse fascination[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Fred and Ginger Smoke the Competition in Roberta
“Heaven rest us, I’m not asbestos” Roberta is one of the least known,1 and one of the very best, of the films that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers did together. It features some of[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Erin Brockovich: Easy on the Eyes, Brutal on the Brain
Julia Roberts has tits! It’s a well-known fact that Julia Roberts can turn the world on with her smile. When she puts her whole bod into it, the very heavens start to[…]
American Psycho: If looks could kill, this dude wouldn’t need a blade
The year is 1987. Wall Street smoothie Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is preparing to meet the new day. As he anoints his buff-enough-for-Bay-Watch bod with an endless series of unguents, emollients,[…]
Book review: Back Lot, by Maurice Rapf
Back Lot: Growing Up with the Movies, by Maurice Rapf. (Lanham, Md.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1999). Cloth, $39.50. 211pp. ISBN 0-8108-3583-5 Maurice Rapf was a communist. He also forced[…]
“A Third Party Might Spoil This”: The Gay Divorcee
Fred and Ginger get continental on your ass The Gay Divorcee1 is the quintessential Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie. It’s not their best – largely because Ginger’s dancing skills[…]
Fight Club Hits New Low in Testosterone Impairment
This just in – men are stupid. “It is useless,” Dr. Johnson1 once remarked, “to criticize an unresisting imbecility.” He was referring, of course, to Carrot Top’s act, but his[…]
Here’s Lookin’ at You, Kid! Alfred Hitchcock and Psycho
Hitch’s – and by now the whole damn culture’s – seminal Oedipal nightmare revisited Read the companion photo essay “Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone”[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Fred and Ginger Take Off: Flying Down to Rio
“Hey fella, twirl that old propella” Hollywood producer Merriam Cooper loved three things: airplanes, the tropics, and giant gorillas.1 In Flying Down to Rio, Cooper’s 1933 airborne musical, he went[…]
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