Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
“Being Marxist in the Groucho rather than Karl sense would have required the Ten to not take themselves or their politics so seriously.”
“Tashlin’s tenure at Warner Bros. did not provide him with a ‘cartoon aesthetic’ that could be applied, ready-made, to his features; rather, it allowed him to develop a feature filmmaking aesthetic through cartoons.”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
“She came at me in sections . . . she was bad . . . she was dangerous . . . she was my kind of woman.”
Wonder Boys is a wonder; The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, not so much
“It is a protean film, and changes radically depending on how you approach it.”
But I soon thought it through and realized any initial discomfort on my part was more a realization of the shoe being on the other foot… why shouldn’t beefcake images be as important in a magazine as the cheesecake? Both were represented pretty well on Valley’s beat: Scarlet Street was/is, is beyond any agenda in itself.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhqOFWdtDdY] Remember when Jean-Luc Godard made films that were avant-garde but still, somehow, comprehensible? That was a long time ago, the 1960s to be precise. Yet, like The Big Lebowski’s[…]
Directors · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
Can a film’s designer be its effective auteur? He can, if his name is William Cameron Menzies. Menzies is best known for directing and designing two classics of the science[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Silents
“He could be suave or awkward, likable or pesky, average or eccentric, a winner or a loser, a fussy nerd or the life of the party, all the while remaining Charley Chase.”
He worked for Time; that can do things to a man
Actors & Personalities · Silents
“Lawrence had become a movie star for many reasons — gentleness, grace, that silky hair, and what Laemmle assessed as ‘sensational bubbies.'”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals · Writers & Critics
“My God! — cried out a querulous voice within me — is it possible that we, artists of the stage, are doomed by the materiality of our bodies to eternal servitude and the representation of crude reality?” — Stanislavsky, questioning his Realistic method after a failed 1904 production of symbolist one-act plays by Maeterlink2 “The stage is art . . . There’s a genre painting by Kramskoy in which the faces are portrayed superbly. What would happen if you cut the nose out of one of the paintings and substituted a real one? The nose would be “realistic” but the picture would be ruined.” — Chekhov, explaining to an actor why offstage sounds of croaking frogs and buzzing dragonflies would not render a 1898 production of The Seagull more “realistic”3
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · War
“In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke it is written, the kingdom of Godis within man, not one man or a group of men but in all men.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
“Life isn’t short enough . . .” Laurel in Sons of the Desert (1934)
Documentaries · Reviews · Writers & Critics
Talking heads, talking of talking heads
“I’m using the computer (Photoshop) a bit more than I like to admit, but I still love traditional illustration, watercolor and oils.”
Interviews · Noir · Writers & Critics
“[My film] is stylized and theatrical because the story is so telescoped we have a life-and-death outcome played out over 20 actual minutes.”
Essays · Noir · Writers & Critics
Or Advanced Guide to Cinematic Survival?
“I had to allow time to let experience ferment inside me, and by then you forget whether what you went through was useful or not!”
“I have always contended that in addition to talent, success depends on a little bit of luck, and my luck seemed to have run out, professionally at least.” –Preston Sturges, on the making of The French, They Are a Funny Race1
