Hollywood Daedalus: The Robert Wise of Audrey Rose
Befitting a great film architect, Robert Wise gave good prologue. The beauty of a prologue well executed is in more than setting a mood or tone or offering simple backstory[…]
Category: Directors
The Taste of Greasepaint: On Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel and Ozu’s Floating Weeds
The Bergman film is much darker, and examines – with sadistic, Strindbergian zeal – the cruelties that men and women inflict on one other when love is distorted by power.[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries
Recovering The New-Ark: Amiri Baraka’s Lost Chronicle of Black Power in Newark, 1968
In 1968, famed Black Power poet, playwright, and filmmaker Amiri Baraka, who died on January 9, 2014 at the age of 79, made a documentary in and around Spirit House,[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Inside New York’s Subway Secret: Talking with the Makers of La Voz de los silenciados (The Voice of the Voiceless)
When a film screening is greeted first with silence, it is certainly not easy on the director. “It was so scary, everybody was so silent in the theatre we were[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground
One Frame Apart: On Straub and Huillet and Pedro Costa’s Where Does Your Secret Smile Lie?
“For a start, Straub and Huillet’s relationship is far from an image of perfect union. It seems to thrive on a combination of disagreement and respect, a dialectical tussle worthy[…]
Hanging in a Classroom Some Day: Woody Allen, Artistic Legacy, and the Blu-ray Editions of Annie Hall and Manhattan
Annie Hall is warm, taut rather than loose, angular instead of fuzzy, Manhattan is a love letter to New York, a hymn to neurosis, and a delicate straddling of the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Reviews
Clint, Caught in the Act: On The Beguiled, and Don Siegel’s Leading Man
“While the premise of an injured soldier recuperating in a house full of smitten women seems ripe for male-fantasy debasement, the film is deeply interested in the psyches of its[…]
Comedy · Directors · Essays · Writers & Critics
Team Apatow and the Tropes of Geek-Centered Romantic Comedy
“Nowadays, schlubs play schlubs and audiences are expected to accept that geeky males can win over classically beautiful women. What does it tell us about the state of gender relations, sexual fantasy, and desire that a physically average geek like Seth Rogen can trump an iconically attractive and glamorous star like Cary Grant?”
John Huston’s “No Exit” Ensemble Dramas
For every filmmaker who is considered an auteur, there is a key work – often a first film like Welles’ Citizen Kane – that expresses in essential form most of[…]
Book Review: My Lunches with Orson
My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, Edited by Peter Biskind. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013. Hardcover, $28.00. 306pp. ISBNL 978-0-8050-9725252800 The reader in search of[…]
Allan Dwan: Between the Lines
“Dwan was never afraid of melodrama, so often disdained for its contrivance, implausibility and heightened emotion; nor of farce, with its tendency to reduce characters to spastic puppets or wind-up toys. Dwan’s skill at visually expressing relationships — the legacy of his nearly two decades making silent movies — cannot by itself salvage stories or characters that fail that test of engaging us; but when combined with his crisp narrative intelligence and detached yet compassionate eye for human behavior, it gives his best films an apparently effortless power to engross.”
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Historical & Epic · Interviews
Histories Private and Public: Talking with Péter Forgács about Letters to Afar
“We wanted to do a writing of history through a sensual observance of the films. By having those details opened up, we show how the daily life was — not by explaining didactically but rather offering this inner representation.”
Directors · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Tarantino and Spielberg: Two Visions of America
“In Lincoln, the abolition of slavery is the goal of the narrative; the closing scenes are intended to confirm our notion of a historical trajectory that moves from injustice to justice. In Django Unchained, the narrative is simpler, but the notions of justice and history are more complex. The story gives no hint that slavery will ever be abolished. It presents an America that has yet to escape its foundational sin, and may never be able to.”
Shyamalan’s a Ding-Dong: After Earth (Will Smith is a great dad, please)
We don’t want to see dead people, but we damn sure want them to see us.
Vincente Minnelli’s Descents Into Hell
Vincente Minnelli’s reputation is that of a stylist – someone who did not author his own screenplays, but who directed whatever the studio (usually MGM) assigned to him (usually musicals), and[…]
Directors · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
The Man Who Shot John Ford — in 3D: Spielberg Retrofits Jurassic Park with Mixed Results
“As cold and insincere as it may be for Spielberg to flush an ‘updated’ version back into theaters as a marketing blitz for the forthcoming 3D sequel, Jurassic Park still[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
“It Could Cause a Popular Uproar”: Interview with Amir Ramses on his controversial documentary Jews of Egypt
“They were educated in security, and these guys are raised with the concept that the word ‘Jew’ means ‘enemy.’ They all look at themselves in the mirror, and they imagine themselves to be superheroes, spy killers . . . I doubt they even saw the film before banning it.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Producers & Studios · Silents
Who Was the Real James Young Deer? The Mysterious Identity of the Pathè Producer Finally Comes to Light
“With his acting experience and technical know-how, Young Deer soon advanced to one of Pathé’s leading filmmakers. His Indian identity served him well: no one in the cast or crew at that time would have taken orders from a black man.”
The Man Who Shot John Ford — in 3D: Spielberg Retrofits Jurassic Park with Mixed Results
“As cold and insincere as it may be for Spielberg to flush an ‘updated’ version back into theaters as a marketing blitz for the forthcoming 3D sequel, Jurassic Park still exemplifies, for better and worse, the staying power and effectiveness of Spielbergian theme park ride filmmaking, independent of the fact that it is actually about a theme park, and its success is a testament to how skilled he can be at showing an audience what it wants to see.”
Michael Curtiz – Auteur Without a Theme?
Hungarian-born filmmaker, Michael Curtiz (pictured with Joan Crawford, above), is considered by many to be one of the quintessential Hollywood directors – he is, after all, the man who[…]
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