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.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
“The man’s a genius!” —Jerry Lewis
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
“Today’s Rosa Moline would treat her lack of sophistication as a resource and her isolation as a launching pad.”
Directors · Interviews · Music & Musicals
“Being middle-age rock and rollers, just trying to pay the bills, isn’t an easy lifestyle.”
Interviews · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
In which the author talks about being a lifelong SF movie freak and updating his seminal SF compendium Keep Watching the Skies! for the new millennium
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 · 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
