Leni’s Body Beautiful: Forty Years of Riefenstahl’s Olympic Gaze in the James Bond Title Credits
In the beginning there was Leni, and Leni begat Robert and Maurice, who begat the Bond title sequences.
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In the beginning there was Leni, and Leni begat Robert and Maurice, who begat the Bond title sequences.
On cliche, culture, and locating national identity in Wise’s epic musical
Documentaries · Essays · LGBT & Queer · Religion & Spirituality
Who will judge the judges trembling before sex? The atheists!
The opposite of realism is not fantasy, but disappointment
Imitation: great for flattery, bad for art
On civilization and its discontents I recently saw a list of Luddite movies that listed Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), and Lang’s Metropolis (1927), among others. Luddites[…]
Actors & Personalities · Essays · Reviews
I had an opportunity to see a double feature a couple of years ago on a British Airways flight to Madrid. The size of the screen certainly reduced any desire[…]
“I’ll do anything … ANYTHING” to save Daddy!” Introduction Based on the famous – or better, notorious – faux pornographic novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, Candy (Christian Marquand,[…]
Essays · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
A close reading points to the latter. For those who see popular film as capable of providing more than cheap visceral thrills, the dismal nature of recent writing on Attack[…]
Hollywood shows some unsuspected radical tendencies – after eight years of Clintonian “liberalism” “Hollywood is at its best when it is relating to a progressive left political force that’s already[…]
Two films of 1936, Chaplin’s Modern Times and Fritz Lang’s Fury (with Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sydney), appear to have little in common. The former sardonically depicts a man at[…]
Essays · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Parker’s “ode to bathroom humor” plumbs surprising depths Contemporary American comedy evades realistic treatment of social issues, opting instead for escape from these issues. That the bulk of racial representation[…]
Of babynappings and bodily fluids, Coens and Kubricks In Raising Arizona (1987), a blatantly obscure graffiti can be seen in the lavatory wall behind escaped convicts, Hale and Evelle (John[…]
The cripplingly small-minded art of verisimilitude becomes crippled by its own technology Are Human Beings Real, or Do They Only Act That Way? When we contemplate all the sinister, spirit-truncheoning[…]
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
All jargon and no authenticity? Of the vast numbers of corporate-made genre films that flooded Japanin the 1970s, Donald Richie once remarked that the “West knows nothing of these pictures,[…]
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Feminism adrift in a sea of ogling orientalism, global capitalism, and fatalist aesthetics INTRODUCTION Chinese Women’s Issues Under the Polar Aesthetics of Female Suffering and Mulan-ism Since the 1919 May[…]
Directors · Essays · Producers & Studios · Reviews
Opening the Eyes Wide Shut censorship battles for a close look A recent viewing of Eyes Wide Shut (1999) on HBO reminded me when, three summers ago, I had counted[…]
