Actors & Personalities · Comedy
Nuts and Nice Messes: On Laurel and Hardy
“Life isn’t short enough . . .” Laurel in Sons of the Desert (1934)
Category: Artists
“What More Could a Boy Want?” An Interview with Artist Jim McDermott
“I’m using the computer (Photoshop) a bit more than I like to admit, but I still love traditional illustration, watercolor and oils.”
When Luck Runs Out: Preston Sturges’ Gallic Swan Song
“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
Interviews · Noir · Writers & Critics
A Writer’s Evolution: An Interview with Eddie Muller
“[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.”
Fifty plus Fifty: The Fifty Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood Reconsidered: The Sorrows of Ezra, as Told by Himself
He worked for Time; that can do things to a man
Portrait of a Soundscapist: An Interview with Peter Strickland
“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!”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals · Writers & Critics
Boris Godunov in America: Notes on a Meyerhold Production Resurrected*
“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
Documentaries · Reviews · Writers & Critics
“Riveting”* — Not! Gerald Peary’s For the Love of Movies — The Story of American Film Criticism
Talking heads, talking of talking heads
Essays · Noir · Writers & Critics
Ossessione: Shabby Little Shocker?
Or Advanced Guide to Cinematic Survival?
Memoir · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
Wild Love: Spike Jonze Meets Maurice Sendak in Where the Wild Things Are
“I’ll eat you up. I love you so.”
Cary Grant: Prince of Denmark
“If we take Grant seriously, we must contend with an extreme difficulty: what appears to be fake, an actor portraying a character, might be real; what we normally think of as real, a person gesturing in the everyday world, might well be artificial.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
Forgotten Charleys I: Charley Bowers: Silent Comedy’s Wizard of the Bizarre
“He is Aladdin and the camera is his lamp.” — James R. Quirk
The Pervert’s Guide to The Birds: Of Hitchcock, Žižek, the Maternal Superego, and Critical Confusion
“It is the search for explanation itself and the experience of the alien, disturbing, and frightening that thrills audiences.” In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, directed and produced by Sophie Fiennes,[…]
Serious Joke: The Coen Brothers’ Emergence as Jewish Humorists
“The films of the Coen brothers seem to take place in a postmodern Chelm, displaced chronologically and geographically.”
Writing (and Filming) the Memories: An Interview with Guillermo Arriaga on The Burning Plain
“Arriaga’s use of eroticism and semi-incest between respective children of the two illicit lovers is more than a pastiche; it’s an organic outgrowth from an idea.”
Counterculture · Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Drawing from Life: Talking with Director George Hickenlooper
On Art, Identity, Families, Fragmentation, Medication . . . and Fulfillment
Lists · Movies · Writers & Critics
Rating Movies: Or, Seeing Stars
“I want my favorites to get the high ratings — my judgments are being challenged by anonymous forces whom I cannot confront.”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Fred Astaire, Two Steps Forward and One Step Back: Fred and Vera-Ellen, Not Quite Walking on Air in The Belle of New York
Can quantity trump quality? Not so much
Hollywood’s Nightmare, Not Ours: On The Mist, Story (1980) and Film (2007)
Director Frank Barabont hijacks — and sinks — Stephen King’s powerful allegory of political oppression
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