Counterculture · Essays · Writers & Critics
On the Road to the Ninth Circle of Hell: Easy Rider Merges Lanes with Dante’s Inferno and Faust
How Easy Rider laid the groundwork for Wild Hogs
Category: Artists
Actors & Personalities · Experimental & Underground
In a Garden of Tin Men: Marion Eaton (1932–2011) Remembered
“Marion’s character in Thundercrack!, the daft and delusional farm widow Gert Hammond, harkened back to a much more handcrafted Tennessee Williamsesque archetype. She infuses Gert with real pathos as well as genuine creepiness in a series of hauntingly photographed monologues that transcend the film’s threadbare conceits.”
The Annihilative Evils of the Polka Tremblante: Fragments on Rhetoric, Naiveté, and Inevitable Helixes
“Leontev’s rhetoric, though overblown, might strike a chord in those who lament the replacement of honest, inspired amateurism with the interchangeable bodies of the trousered professional class. But wait . . . the polka tremblante?”
Bergman’s Women: The Representation of Patriarchy and Class in Persona (1967) and Cries and Whispers (1972)
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy”
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Uncategorized
Fractured Synthesis: The Blender Aesthetic of Outsider filmmaker Bob Moricz
“Moricz’s work assaults the viewer with a whiplash barrage of familiar plot lines, trite turning points, and cliché characters spouting simultaneously banal and inflated rhetorical dialogue, all infusing narratives propelled by a poignant and urgent anxiety derived from the tensions of everyday life.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors
Meet the Devil: Remembering John Huston
“Huston once described his job to John Milius like this: ‘You will confer with generals, you will dine at the table with kings, and you will sleep with titled women. All of this you will do while being dead broke. That’s what being a director is.’ Should we even feign surprise that when it came time to make The Bible he cast himself as the voice of the Almighty?
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
Ernie Kovacs: An American Secret
“Ernie’s contract is reported to contain a clause forbidding him ever to consult a psychiatrist. The network is afraid if he ever became normal he’d be ruined.” — Dorothy Kilgallen
Actors & Personalities · TV & Streaming
How to Play a Superhero: Lynda Carter, Popular Culture Feminism, and the Search for Wonder Woman
After three decades of searching in vain for another Wonder Woman, it’s time to reiterate the importance of Lynda Carter’s iconic portrayal and its meaning to popular culture feminism.Pop[ular] culture n. Culture based on popular taste rather than that of an educated elite, usually commercialized and made widely available by the mass media. Feminism n. Advocacy of the rights of women (based on the theory of equality of the sexes). — Oxford English Dictionary
Directors · Experimental & Underground
George Kuchar and the Great Beyond
by Bob Moricz [Editor’s note: This is our second tribute to George Kuchar, who passed away in San Francisco on Tuesday, September 6, 2011, age 69, from prostate cancer. He was[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
George Kuchar: A First-Person Life
[Editor’s note: George Kuchar passed away in San Francisco on Tuesday, September 6, 2011, age 69. The cause was prostate cancer. He was beloved by many, and was certainly a[…]
Forgotten Fathers – Maurice Tourneur, Richard Oswald
The Frenchman, Maurice Tourneur, and the Austrian, Richard Oswald, were major producer/directors during cinema’s Silent Era, but are hardly remembered today. These days, movie lovers are more likely to know the films and[…]
Boris Barnet: The Lyric Voice in Soviet Cinema
“If the silent period showed the flashes of brilliance as well as the unevenness of Barnet’s talent, the next few years would see him produce two worldwide masterpieces that place him as a precursor of French Poetic Realism and the work of Jean Renoir, as well as an influence on the French New Wave through the works of Truffaut, Godard, and Rivette.”
Bodies Politic/Body Politics: The Political and the Personal in Contemporary Film Essays
“Your body is a microcosm of all existence.” — Death: A Love Story
Young Ones and Swan Songs: Luis Bunuel in Mexico, Bela Tarr in Edinburgh
“Attempts to create interesting projects of any sort despite our limitations can sometimes touch us more deeply than slick illusions that — literally by design — hide a lot of skill and effort, yet, in so doing, also hide something of the crazy courage it takes just to be human.”
Directors · Experimental & Underground
A Dream That Was Not All a Dream: The Films of André Delvaux
“For him, film was not only a profession but a mean of investigating cinema as a language, an investigation in which theory and film practice went hand in hand.”
The Envelope of Time: Wrapping Up the Past in Chris Marker, Alexander Sokurov, and José Luis Guerín
“Being beautiful fights trivializing and ironization by the camera; it saves the women from being regarded as cheap or inscrutable. Elegance and glamour paradoxically grant these subjects an inner life.”
Greer Garson and the Good War: How We All Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great Lady
“Almost everything about Greer, her graceful figure, little mannerisms, the way she walks, talks, and smiles, reminds us of the Nineties, when Papa sat at the head of the table, airing his arrogant opinions, and never dreaming that his demure little wife, resourceful as a dozen U.S. Army engineers, was twisting him around her little finger, really running him and everything else in the house.” — Charles Samuels in Motion Picture magazine (1945)
Producers & Studios · Writers & Critics
Talk Is Cheap: On Aaron Sorkin’s Moral Compass
“You want answers?” “I want the truth!” “You can’t handle the truth!” — A Few Good Men (1992), screenplay by Aaron Sorkin
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica
The Complete Exile: The Films of Carlos Atanes
“These shoestring-budget shot-on-video works already demonstrate Atanes’ characteristic gifts for composition and staging combined with a knack for finding bleakly evocative locations that reinforce his themes of power, oppression, exile or, entrapment and the dream of alternate realities where freedom might be possible.”
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