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
Category: Artists
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.”
David Niven: “P. G. Wodehouse with Tears”
“What you got was what you saw, a man with a soldier’s training speaking ever so nicely and trying not to stretch himself beyond his abilities as an actor.” ~ David Niven
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.”
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.”
Actors & Personalities · Photo Essays
Don’t It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue? What Really Separates Ben and Matt
Hand me those contacts!
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
Books · Essays · Uncategorized · Writers & Critics
On the Escarpment, Off the Escarpment: It Helps When the Love Is Strong
Especially when the lovers aren’t
Sean Connery: A “Natural Thruster”
“Connery, never a martyr to false modesty, remains as voluble and combative as ever.”
Essays · LGBT & Queer · Writers & Critics
Contagious Homosexuality: Cruising and Sodom and Gomorrah
“In both Sodom and Gomorrah and Cruising, homosexuality – and its alternate currents – is caught with a glance.”
Can’t Repeat the Past? Of Course You Can’t – and Shouldn’t
Filming The Great Gatsby in the 21st Century
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.”
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JACK ARNOLD (October 14, 1916 – March 17, 1992)
Photo: Director Jack Arnold (right) shows star Grant Williams how to handle a giant prop used in the making of The Incredible Shrinking Man. If director Jack Arnold were alive[…]
Set my Polack free!
An apt cinematic analogy of the Polanski brouhaha can be found in Charles Laughton’s NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, namely the hyper-reactive old salt of the general store, Mrs. Icey Spoon[…]
The original inglorious bastard
In the midst of this blogospheric firestorm revolving around Inglourious Basterds, one relatively mild concession we can all make is that, for one reason or another, the movie (like all[…]
Links + BSA
