Going to Extremes, Part One: Pericles (Some Mouldy Tale)
Drama is about extremity. This can centre on one person, or on his/her society or both. Without it drama cannot exist. But what if the world’s greatest dramatist starts testing[…]
Category: Artists
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 · Silents
The Man Who Had Everything: The Curious Case of Jack Pickford and the New York Times
INTRODUCTION Jack Pickford – actor, director, and alleged womaniser, alcoholic, drug-user, bootlegger and all-around scoundrel. Born in 1896, Jack was the brother of Mary Pickford, the Queen of Hollywood during[…]
The Fall of the House of Warner: The Warner Brothers
“In the 1930s, Warners effectively became the studio to go to for social critique, a risky position to hold under the Hays Code when pictures could be censored not just[…]
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[…]
Beyond Borders: Talking with Filmmaker Eyas Salman
“Salman says he identifies as a Palestinian, but does not feel a sense of nationalism. His is not the generation that still holds onto house keys and deeds to property[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
It’s Always Fair Weather? I’m Afraid Not: Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse Say Good-bye to Broadway
What’s black and white and destroys Western Civilization?
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?”
Happy 100 Years of Frances Farmer
When witches lay curses down upon the cowardly townsfolk about to hang or burn them, it’s almost always “I’ll be back to haunt your ancestors in 100 years!” Is it time then for Frances Farmer to return for that long-awaited revenge on Seattle, the patriarchy, the legal system, Hollywood, and the American Medical Association? Let’s hope
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[…]
Actors & Personalities · Exploitation & Erotica
Soul Diva, John Waters Star Jean Hill Dies
When people die there is usually an element of shock to the news, but when I heard Jean Hill passed away this week (8/21/13) I wasn’t shocked, since her health[…]
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[…]
Lardani’s Signature: Technical Mastery and Apparent Glitch in Eugenio Lardani’s titles for Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
“These features distinguish Lardani’s credit from the rest of the sequence in a very dramatic way — unlike the other titles, which are immediately obvious as credits, it is possible to miss his credit entirely, a strange distinction to choose given his role and, according to his son, complete freedom in creating the design. It is almost as if his title card is hidden in plain sight.”
Actors & Personalities · Writers & Critics
“We’ll Roll in the Hey Nonny Nonny!” Antic Antiques to Keep a Drowsy Emperor Awake, if He’s Not Too Sleepy
Some of the films of Noël Coward, some of the films of Ernst Lubitsch, and one of the films of Oscar Wilde
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.”
Play-Actor: On Trevor Howard
“The whole point of Howard’s screen persona was surely its combination of the ramrod-straight and the slyly subversive, and its creation of a façade that was eternally gruff yet perpetually seemed to be in on some wonderful joke.”
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.”
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