“Spielberg’s post-millennial Lincoln epitomizes the more experienced politician’s awe for Justice (as distinguished from the malleable Law), which is to be sought by whatever means necessary and inevitably involves sacrifice, perhaps of one’s very soul. There’s more than a touch of Faust in this script.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals
“While Powell and Pressburger were masters of the classic show-don’t-tell method, they also daringly broke the rule by telling, not showing. Both techniques ultimately serve the same purpose. Despite the aesthetic of excess often attributed to the Archers’ films, they gain power by withholding certain elements, requiring the audience to supply what’s not there.”
“Director Arnold heightens the once-“natural” processes of life events such as birth and death by setting them outside, historically as if for the last time, before Western medicine and Victorian domesticity.”
Great drama often depends on the playwright’s ability to select (or invent) a fateful day or two in his hero’s life that symbolically sums him up and enables him to[…]
“If you can get past all these potentially off-putting deviations, Park Row offers Samuel Fuller at his most free, exuberant, and even experimental. As unfocused as the narrative is, it is essentially a realist fable, or collection of fables, condensing an entire rough-and-tumble era into a coincidence-riddled pill.”
“Though most people in earlier times could not even have imagined the present role of science and technology, nor, even more implausibly, the apparently alternate life offered by the cinema and its recent offshoots, the human imagination refused to be tied down.”
“Both films suggest Europe has run aground spiritually, as they both depict the Catholic Church and its representatives to be as bloodthirsty as the conquistadors.”
Asian · Historical & Epic · War
“The monumental approach, as one would guess, takes history as something to be inspired by, as a record of human greatness that serves to encourage similar greatness by individuals in future times; in the case of City of Life and Death, it is the various acts of compassion and solidarity that play this role.”
“Sex mingles easily with religion, and their blending has one of those slightly repulsive and yet exquisite and poignant flavors, which startle the palate like a revelation — of what? That, precisely, is the question.” – Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun “The Devils is Arthur Miller’s The Crucible with open sores, open bonfires, court intrigue, the King shooting Protestants for sport, the callous and ludicrous behaviour of the Inquisition, the two-facedness of the King’s soldiers and sex-deprived nuns. It’s about the corruption of a whole town and the man at the centre who defies it. — Ken Russell, quoted in the London Times, March 13, 2012
It’s thumb’s up and thumb’s down for Mann’s sprawling, fascinating, multi-auteur epic that inspired “bone-headed” imitations from Ridley Scott (Gladiator) and Mel Gibson (Braveheart)
Essays · Historical & Epic · War
In which Tarantino reshapes Shakespeare, World War II movies, Leni Riefenstahl, Spaghetti Westerns, and more, under the deft guidance of that Italian master Ovid
Crime · Essays · Historical & Epic
“Putting aside whatever doubts the FBI had about its image in these films, the two films represent one of the many fascinating permutations of the gangster film in the studio era, with the heroic FBI agent acting in a manner befitting an upstanding American, yet able to shift gears and punch out a gangster.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Historical & Epic · Interviews
“I’d love to be Orson’s assistant again.”
“How else is one to approach a historical episode involving humpbacked, sexually frustrated nuns; crippled autocrats; hammer-wielding exorcists; doctors armed with holy water enemas?”
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
“Being Marxist in the Groucho rather than Karl sense would have required the Ten to not take themselves or their politics so seriously.”
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
Crime · Historical & Epic · Reviews
“The Grenouille of the film experiences an emotional epiphany that does not bring him humanity, but at least makes him yearn for its possibilities.”
Activist & Political · Crime · Historical & Epic · Reviews
How a movie exposé of “abuse of power” defends those in power and their institutions
“Dillinger had recently undergone plastic surgery to alter his face and to try to remove his fingerprints. But Public Enemies does not dare to depict that kind of desperation and that determination to survive under any circumstances.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals
“Not frustration of a desire of the subject, but frustration by an object in which his desire is alienated and which the more it is elaborated, the more profound the alienation from his jouissance becomes for the subject.”
