Watch It Again: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
The high-tech and the primitive coexist in The Life Aquatic, much as they do in Keaton’s The Navigator, and as in all of Anderson’s films they combine with the deeply[…]
Category: Comedy
Comedy · Drama · Festivals & Awards
Dispatch from Tribeca #5: Short Takes on To Dust, Song of Back and Neck, Diane
To Dust (dir. Shawn Snyder) “Isn’t that sweet,” I thought when I picked up my mother’s dropped pocket calendar. So many dates had names on them. Mom doesn’t want to[…]
Comedy · Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
Dispatch from Tribeca #1: If you loved Gilda, you’ll Love, Gilda
The effect is intimate, but not particularly enlightening. Love, Gilda offers a lot of reminiscing, some sweet (and a few heavy) insights, but very little new information about Radner’s life.[…]
Focus on Robert Altman: Three Takes on Popeye
Unassimilated weirdness is typical of Popeye – even in its soundtrack, where goofy “boing” effects are used to accompany ordinary, unheroic movement. Sweethaven’s anthem, the Harry Nilsson song “Everything Is[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
No One Gets In Alive! Kicking Down Doors with the Marx Brothers
The Brothers don’t enter into sanctimonious class systems, organizational institutions, or drawing rooms to assimilate and enjoy the fruits of its privileges either; they gain access, enact a savage modus[…]
Activist & Political · Comedy · Horror
Watch it Again! Society (Brian Yuzna, 1989)
Yes, Society supplies the body horror, well crafted in all its sticky glory by Japanese effects expert Screaming Mad George, but it fuses it with teen movie, conspiracy thriller, and[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Jerry Lewis: b. Joseph Levitch, Newark, New Jersey, 1926-2017, res. Hollywood
“The major point of convergence between Cassavetes and the Dogme movement is an oppositional realist form that blurs the boundaries between being and performing.”
Comedy · Comics · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Watch It Again! Batman: The Movie (1966)
The recent passing of Adam West – who made Batman his own despite the many higher-profile claimants to the cape – reminds us of the feature film based on the witty TV[…]
All the Small Things: Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson
Almost as if stolen from the time of the usual commitments of any working person engaged with the world, these images breathe a second, more intimate, rhythm into Paterson and[…]
Jerry Lewis and the Gender of Work
The gender of work in the work films is a spectrum that includes both the neutered worker of The Bellboy and The Errand Boy and the feminized worker of Cinderfella,[…]
In Search of Lost Time: A Review of Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women
The whole film can be viewed as a consciousness-raising of sorts. While even new-wave French auteurs fall into predictable madeleine-inspired memory spirals riffing on (not to put too fine a point[…]
What Makes Them So Successful? A Look into the Philosophy Behind the Coens’ Filmography
The truth is that they tend toward philosophical absurdism, rather than nihilism, and this perspective is what either makes or breaks their film in terms of commercial appeal. The draw,[…]
The Crazy World of His Girl Friday (1940)
His Girl Friday’s headlong pace feels like that of modern life, and its rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue calls to mind our modern media babble, with innumerable people around the globe and[…]
Comedy · Directors · Drama · DVD & Blu-ray · Silents
Two from Flicker Alley: Isn’t Life Wonderful (Griffith, 1924) and Chaplin’s Essanay Comedies, 1915-16
From his very beginnings as a filmmaker, Griffith understood the efficacy of location shooting. Putting actors into real landscapes and streets not only went to authenticating the narrative but had[…]
On Café Society and Woody Allen – Last seen in search of lost innocence, and rich wood paneling!
Art doesn’t have to be autobiographical, does it? Woody can write about the kid he wasn’t as well as the kid he was, can’t he? * * * I haven’t[…]
Originality Is Overrated: Ghostbusters (1984) and Its Remake (2016)
The new Ghostbusters seems quite pleased with itself, but it leaves the overwhelming impression that nobody involved really believed in it. Despite the original film’s numerous flaws and Bill Murray’s[…]
Why Didn’t You Tell Me That I Love You? Asexuality, Polymorphous Perversity, and the Liberation of the Cinematic Clown
The happy ending that sees the clown coupled with the girl never satisfies precisely because we know the clown’s appropriate place is one of “in-between-ness,” a position that stands in[…]
Comedy · Directors · Historical & Epic · LGBT & Queer
Camping Out in Hollywood: The Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!
Hail, Caesar! is not one of the Coens’ better films, but, because of its grab-bag of Hollywood silliness, it is perhaps the best at illuminating one of the main reasons[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama
The Erotic Persona of Jimmy Stewart: From Visionary to Voyeur
You would never guess either from looking at him or from the “aw shucks” way in which he’s remembered that Stewart is responsible for some of the most erotic romantic[…]
“A much more thoughtful and (is it possible?) more mature director”: Woody Allen at Eighty
Years from now, there will be little question as to his place in film history – a prominent seat at the grownups’ table, with a place card highlighting his run[…]
