“Praise the Lord and pass the absinthe!” When Marion Davies first met William Randolph Hearst, she was a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, and a showgirl she remained. She had an uncertain[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
What’s black and white and destroys Western Civilization?
You might think that everyone knows the Beatles. But you would be wrong. When a couple of weeks ago I asked the clerk at Best Buy if they had the[…]
“I wish I was beside her but I’m not there, I’m gone” — from I’m Not There, Bob Dylan
DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals
“Passions, whether violent or not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting disgust, and as music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or in other words must never cease to be music… .”
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.”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · TV & Streaming
Read about what you can’t see
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Sorry, folks, but this is the last dance
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Paris! Gershwin! Been there! Heard that!
Composers · Directors · Music & Musicals · Noir
“Welles familiarizes us with the geography of the town largely through source music. Los Robles is presented as a labyrinth, an inter-place where physical and moral borders are erased.”
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“It comes as no surprise that Dylan, who has made a career out of dodging tidy classifications and labels, would be involved with a film that exhibits traits of both schools of cinéma vérité, rendering it as one of the most challenging and important works of the 1960s.”
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
A documentary on the weird world of Ohioans keeping dangerous wild animals as pets (it’s legal there), this film couldn’t be more timely in the light of recent events
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
“How does Tibet’s cultural destruction differ, in essence, from Time-Warner’s choreographed glamorization of bitches and ho’s in inner-city America, or death metal’s hold over disenfranchised Midwestern youth?”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Come on, do the Sluefoot? That I can resist.
Music & Musicals · Writers & Critics
“Coogan’s representation of Jesus, ascending high above the audience, is far removed from the silly, sexy Jesus who sang to us earlier wearing a wife-beater.”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
“She came at me in sections . . . she was bad . . . she was dangerous . . . she was my kind of woman.”
Directors · Interviews · Music & Musicals
“Being middle-age rock and rollers, just trying to pay the bills, isn’t an easy lifestyle.”
“Aldridge’s shoot is so striking because it purports to discover glamour in the mind of an unhinged woman: an associative path that has been cut by cinema.”
Documentaries · Music & Musicals
“I’m dealing in rock ‘n’ roll. I’m, like, I’m not a bona fide human being.” — Phil Spector
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
