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.
He worked for Time; that can do things to a man
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals · Writers & Critics
“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
Talking heads, talking of talking heads
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?
Memoir · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
“I’ll eat you up. I love you so.”
“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,[…]
Lists · Movies · Writers & Critics
“I want my favorites to get the high ratings — my judgments are being challenged by anonymous forces whom I cannot confront.”
Director Frank Barabont hijacks — and sinks — Stephen King’s powerful allegory of political oppression
“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.”
Essays · LGBT & Queer · Writers & Critics
“In both Sodom and Gomorrah and Cruising, homosexuality – and its alternate currents – is caught with a glance.”
Filming The Great Gatsby in the 21st Century
Books · Essays · Uncategorized · Writers & Critics
Especially when the lovers aren’t
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[…]
…and I mean *everybody*… Jonathan Rosenbaum posted a rather damning blog entry on his website regarding QT’s “IB” that was subsequently picked up and scoffed at by a smattering of[…]
“The concept of pure art pure poetry, pure painting, and so on is not entirely without meaning; but it refers to an aesthetic reality as difficult to define as it is to combat. In any case, even if a certain mixing of the arts remains possible, like the mixing of genres, it does not necessarily follow that they are all fortunate mixtures. There are fruitful cross-breedings which add to the qualities derived from the parents; there are attractive but barren hybrids and there are likewise hideous combinations that bring forth nothing but chimeras.”
Directors · Essays · Writers & Critics
“Kubrick’s 1961 film is really the first 1970s movie.”
Will Thomas Pynchon’s lightest, brightest novel put him in the Hollywood spotlight?
The upcoming release of Alain Resnais’s classic Last Year at Marienbad on Blu-ray DVD reminds us that Marienbad was one of the many formally ambitious films released in the 1960s[…]
