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
Category: Artists
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.”
The King of Chutzpah: On the Singular Pleasures of Phil Silvers
“Silvers raised the smart-aleck, rapid-fire monolog to high art.”
Directors · Festivals & Awards
A Handful of Keepers: The 40th New Directors/New Films Festival
“Kudos to the Vegas for showing not only the grimness of hustling, but also the ordinariness. As Clemente dresses, his middle-aged, matronly partner puts on her reading glasses to count the cash.”
Interviews · Writers & Critics
Of Time and Place: An Interview with Writer Jon Raymond on Meek’s Cutoff and HBO’s Mildred Pierce
“In Meek’s Cutoff — about a community making decisions based on limited information, confronting their own attitudes toward the unknown — it seemed appropriate that the movie would end on a moment of unknowing, incompletion.”
Deborah Kerr: An Actress in Search of an Author
“The camera goes right through the skin. The camera brings out what you are, and in her case, there was always a kind of a humanity that she had in all of the things that she played . . . I think she made movies that have never worn off their splendor.” — Peter Viertel, Kerr’s husband
Actors & Personalities · Directors
Norman, Is That You? The Long Wait of Norman Foster
“Sadly, this oversight neglects Foster’s contributions to both film noir and world cinema, and it dismisses a life nearly as fascinating as that of Welles.”
Between Heaven and Hell: The Movies — Martin Scorsese’s Middle Ground
“Together with his unobstructed panorama of those mean streets, and his long relationship with religion, Scorsese’s character was shaped. It infused in him just the right amount of guilt to develop stories about the struggle between good and evil and that dangerous place in between — not bad enough for hell, not good enough for heaven.”
Mapping the Mind Between Movies: Intertextuality in the Work of Wong Kar-wai
“Frustrated by their unrequited love, their inability to capture their objet petit a, Wong’s characters search desperately for appropriate supplements onto which they can displace their yearnings and desires.”
For Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes)
The Down-to-Earth must know She cannot rival the Sky We move on suspended Between Reality and Dream Between Oblivion and Eternity Through a Labyrinth of Evergreens cjk 8/10/05
Liz Taylor: An Angel Makes Good
Can it be true? Has the living legend Elizabeth Taylor finally merged back into the heaven from which she came? I guess it is. I guess we’ll be seeing[…]
Campy Extraterrestrials – Michael Gough vs. Dudley Manlove
I have written before of my admiration for the late Michael Gough (1916-2011), a British actor who could move effortlessly from the serious classical theater of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Harold Pinter, and Berthold Brecht,[…]
In memoriam: Michael Gough, the Posh Spice of British horror
He brought upper crust polish with a slight hint that his life was way darker and stranger than the poshness let on…
Pariah-dise Now: Charlie Sheen and the busted bubble
“People misunderstand my passion for anger.” Charlie Sheen… was I the only film lover who saw his interview last night on 20/20 and instantly connected his monomaniacal fervor to the[…]
Maria Schneider RIP
If you’re in an empty room with Maria Schneider and she lifts her arms up and starts running around making buzzing sounds, you have two paths open to you:
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries
On the Level: The Films of Frederick Wiseman
“The wonderful paradox of the Wiseman film is that what allows the layered complexities to unfold is the leveling of everything we are shown.”
Crazy Dreams: The World Of Blake Edwards
“The truth is that humour and terror play an equal part in his vision, which takes shape at the point where the two extremes meet.”
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.
SuperBob: Robert Downey Jr. as Star and Superhero
“Like Tony Stark, who is saved by his symbolic birth into a superhero body, Robert Downey Jr. is saved by his rebirth into the movies with a superbody.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews
Loving the Bad: An Interview with Frankie Latina and Sasha Grey on Modus Operandi
“Any director who shoots a grindhouse film without exquisite, triumphant, dangerous, and naked women is doing a disservice to the genre and should move into a different field.”
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