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:
Category: Artists
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.”
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.”
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.”
Essays · Horror · Writers & Critics
The Cinematic Islands of Dr. Moreau: Beasts, Monsters, and Mad Scientists
“There are monsters that are born with a form that is half-animal and half-human . . . which are produced by sodomists and atheists who join together, and break out[…]
R.I.P. Jill Haworth (1945-2011)
Otto Preminger had a thing for saintly blondes. The best known of Preminger’s saintly – and hauntingly beautiful – blondes was Jean Seberg whom Preminger discovered and cast as the lead in[…]
HELLO OUT THERE – The Last Testament of James Whale
Hello Out There (1949), like virtually all of the films James Whale directed after Show Boat, had a troubled production history. It never obtained a commercial release. Yet, unlike any of[…]
Actors & Personalities · Books
Book Review: Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century
Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger’s big fruitcake of a book, Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century from HarperCollins, is hard to take too seriously.[…]
Actors & Personalities · Books
Book Review: Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America
Peter Biskind’s plump new book about the life, loves and career of Warren Beatty, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America (Simon & Schuster, 2010, 627 pgs., $30.00) has come up[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
Loving the Bad: An Interview with Frankie Latina and Sasha Grey on Modus Operandi
by Matthew Sorrento If intentional camp is bad, then camp striving to be bad is even worse. So claimed Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” and others[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Looking at Charlie – Monsieur Verdoux: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“What’s all this about good and evil?” With the release of The Great Dictator late in 1940, Charlie Chaplin had done it again. He had made a movie that, with[…]
Directors · Essays · Writers & Critics
Memos from a Chinese Laundry: Reading Josef von Sternberg
“I would very much like to attract others into my world, but my world is not the world of crowds, though the crowds have often lined up before my world.”1
Music & Musicals · Writers & Critics
It Would Make John Waters Proud, But Shakespeare? Musical Spectacle and the Missing Bard in Hamlet 2
“Coogan’s representation of Jesus, ascending high above the audience, is far removed from the silly, sexy Jesus who sang to us earlier wearing a wife-beater.”
Marxism Goes to the Movies: On Pioneering Activist Film Critic Harry Alan Potamkin
“He’s keenly sensitive to the immense possibilities of film as not merely an aesthetic medium, but given its mass influence, a social one as well.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Historical & Epic · Interviews
Chasing Windmills: Talking with Juan Luis Bunuel about Welles and Don Quixote
“I’d love to be Orson’s assistant again.”
Actors & Personalities · Essays
Short Takes: Acting: James Dean’s Clumsy Punch
“The time-and-place for Dean’s performances is always now, in the moment of its creation, and he resists any technique that obscures that fact.”
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
“He’s Dreaming My Dream!” Beryl Sokoloff’s Web of Artists
Of insular wonderlands and open cityscapes
Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Catching It All in Stride: An Interview with Ariel and Nev Schulman on Catfish
“We just followed the leads.”
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