Actors & Personalities · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer
Monster Queen: The Transgressive Body of Divine in Pink Flamingos
“Divine is as unstoppable as nature, destined to repeatedly transgress, destroy, and create.”
Category: Artists
The Homing Eye: Comparing James Wolcott and Judith Williamson
“Where Williamson is highly critical of films that encourage us to consume lifestyles, Wolcott’s writing appears to be an appreciation of surfaces — in fact, his whole style can be read as an analysis of ’50s textures and design elements.”
Actors & Personalities · Photo Essays
Don’t It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue? What Really Separates Ben and Matt
Hand me those contacts!
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Interviews · Visual Artists
“Myself as Queen”: A Profile and Interview with Anna Biller
“My interest in creating visual worlds is what led me to both painting and film.”
Actors & Personalities · Interviews
Confessions of a Hollywood Tough Guy: An Interview with Rod Steiger
“The only thing that is absolutely important for me is quality.”
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Rudolph Valentino: Dream Lover
“Valentino said there’s nothing like tile for a tango!” — Norma Desmond to Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Love Among the Insects: The Pioneering Animation of Ladislaw Starewicz, One Hundred Years Later
“His insects lie, cheat, steal, get drunk, have affairs, and fight with each other, occupying a harsh reality where bad choices have bad consequences and dead things stay dead.”
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
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
Some Cameroning, Part 2 – Cameron as Auteur
Can a filmmaker spend most of his or her artistic life recycling other people’s ideas and still be a true auteur? Sure. Why not? Any idea, theme, style, or attitude[…]
Good night, Mr. Tikhonov, wherever you are…
Vyacheslav Tikhonov, who starred as Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (1967), died last Friday (12/4) at the age of 81. Tikhonov is one of a trio[…]
Brothers in Cynicism
Every time a new film by the Coen brothers comes out, I dread having to hear from the same old so-and-so’s who can’t bear to slog through the Coens’ peculiar[…]
Blake Edwards vs. Hollywood: Sunset and the Myth of Hollywood’s Golden Age
A tour of Edwards’ curious 1988 film, with side trips to variations by James Ivory, John Schlesinger, and others
Directors · Experimental & Underground · Interviews
Film and Film and Film: An Interview with Jonas Mekas
“One who knows how to, as they say, ‘read’ the images, can tell everything about me.”
Roman Polanski: What’s on Trial?
What is fascinating about the Polanski case is that it is not particularly about Polanski. Looking at the debate raised in France (where I live) and the United States –[…]
Activist & Political · Directors · Interviews
Just Say Oui: An Interview with the Yes Men
“I’m shitting bricks, thinking he’s onto me.”
Books · Essays · Uncategorized · Writers & Critics
On the Escarpment, Off the Escarpment: It Helps When the Love Is Strong
Especially when the lovers aren’t
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