Katherine Heigl: Infantilization’s Poster Girl
Third wave feminism was bad enough with its “I’m a princess who should be spoiled rotten and pampered AND treated with full equality to men” cake and eating it[…]
Category: Artists
Catfish: A New Medium for a Motif
Note: this review discusses major plot points but doesn’t reveal the surprising turn. Much of what is discussed below can be found in the promotional material. Catfish opens in Philadelphia[…]
The Late Claude Chabrol – Some Personal Favorites
There was something so damned likeable about Claude Chabrol (June 24,1930 – September 12, 2010). He had a remarkable enthusiasm for films and the process of filmmaking which translated into[…]
The More I See of Marion Cotillard
the more I am fascinated by her. Loved her in Mann’s Public Enemies and as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. I was even impressed by her Vanity Fair[…]
Happy Birthday, Robert Siodmak (And Sorry for all the Misconceptions)
Director Robert Siodmak was born on August 8, 1900, in Dresden, Germany. If alive today, he would be 110. In 1994, in an article entitled Beyond the Golden[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
A Few Steps Shy of a Masterpiece: Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse Apply Themselves in The Band Wagon
“She came at me in sections . . . she was bad . . . she was dangerous . . . she was my kind of woman.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Pierre Etaix: Revisiting a Forgotten Master
“The man’s a genius!” —Jerry Lewis
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
All-American Medea: The Radical Pleasures of Beyond the Forest
“Today’s Rosa Moline would treat her lack of sophistication as a resource and her isolation as a launching pad.”
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
Paging Groucho! Notes on Morrie Ryskind and HUAC
“Being Marxist in the Groucho rather than Karl sense would have required the Ten to not take themselves or their politics so seriously.”
Atom Egoyan’s Chloe: Sex Cinema High and Low
“It is a protean film, and changes radically depending on how you approach it.”
Directors · Interviews · Music & Musicals
Family Remains: An Interview with Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler on Documenting Fishbone in Everyday Sunshine
“Being middle-age rock and rollers, just trying to pay the bills, isn’t an easy lifestyle.”
Interviews · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
Back to the Futuristic: An Interview with Bill Warren
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
Frank Tashlin: The Animated Auteur
“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.”
The Mysteries of Adaptation: Michael Chabon’s Novels Onscreen
Wonder Boys is a wonder; The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, not so much
A Gay Pride Parade Goes Down SCARLET STREET: Remembering Richard Valley 1949-2007
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.
Godard Abides
[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
William Cameron Menzies and the Totalitarian Menace
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
Forgotten Charleys II: Charley Chase: Mr. Normal Unleashes His Comic Demon
“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.”
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Florence Lawrence: “The First Movie Star”
“Lawrence had become a movie star for many reasons — gentleness, grace, that silky hair, and what Laemmle assessed as ‘sensational bubbies.'”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · War
Looking at Charlie: The Great Dictator: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“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.”
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