Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · TV & Streaming
Fred’s on TV! But You Can’t See Him, Except on YouTube
Read about what you can’t see
Category: Genres
Actors & Personalities · Reviews · Westerns
Carl Foreman’s and Fred Zinneman’s High Noon: Kelly versus Jurado! The Ultimate Face-Off!
O to be torn, ‘twixt love and duty
Straight arrow? Not Exactly. Jennifer Lawrence in Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games
Why do lesbians have to be so boring?
Directors · Interviews · LGBT & Queer
“Something That Is Dangerous and Arousing and Transgressive”: An Interview with Todd Haynes
“I’m just always interested in the ways in which we are not free agents, that our desires, our instincts, our anger, our determination, our survival instincts all butt against social constraints and social learning that are really deep. It’s not just a matter of changing your job or your lover.”
May I Touch Your Meat? Jan Svankmajer, Birth Trauma, and the Gesture Toward Touch
“Life is a continuity which does not begin at birth; it is split up by birth.” — Nandor Fodor
Pushing Limits: On Crime, Bollywood, and Kahaani
“Kahaani captures this moment of rising disillusionment and change in the world. There is no ‘riding-into-the-sunset’ happy ending, for Vidya still remains an unhappy widow at the close of the movie: perhaps an appropriate resolution for these angsty times.”
Chump’s Ticket: BED OF ROSES (1933), SMART WOMAN (1931)
“Who’d of thunk there was a fake Mae West?”
Activist & Political · Festivals & Awards
Growing Pains: The 2012 Moscow and Odessa International Film Festivals
“Peter Greenaway’s theses on the death of cinema perhaps inspired the greatest discussion at the Odessa festival: his insistent repetition that cinema was dead but that the screen is very much alive was received as an interesting provocation but didn’t convince many.”
New Fathers, Old Conflicts? Patriarchal Politics in 3:10 to Yuma, Don’t Come Knocking, and Atmen
“Is emotional capacity, as figured by film, an entity of fixed dimension, so that if men are represented as more caring, women must be represented as caring less?”
(Re)Staging the Story: The Pre-History of Cinema
“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.”
Death of a President: The Last Temptation of Anti-Bush Critics
“Where many people watch a film for a true or faithful rendition of an historical event, I needed confirmation that the thing I was viewing was . . . made up!”
Lost in Space: Stunning Special Effects Can’t Obscure the Flaws in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012)
“What is human?” Scott asks. “Make us care,” the audience replies.
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Nothin’ but Legs! Fred and Cyd Go out Kicking in Cole Porter’s Silk Stockings
Sorry, folks, but this is the last dance
It’s Not Just a Movie, or Batman’s Face Is Our Mask
“Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough, sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.” — Batman
Reactionary Riffs: The Failures of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
“The final result of this pretentiousness is The Dark Knight Rises, a Batman film in name only, a joyless endeavor that ignores its heritage and puts on airs to conceal the half-baked politics and juvenile head games hiding behind its dark and scowling mask.”
“Film Blanc”: Shoveling Toward the Meaning of Fargo (1996)
“In Fargo, a milieu of livid pettiness and stunted lives, capitalist migraines, and psychotic rampages prevails beneath the veneer of cheesy, Norman Rockwellian Middle America.”
Experimental & Underground · Festivals & Awards
All Shook Up: Australian International Experimental Film Festival 2012
“Despite this titillated vision, we experience a slight distance as a result of the period fashions and bodies — the women appear relatively natural and unsculpted by today’s standards.”
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Genres
Random Acts of Sensible Violence: Genre, Hong Kong Censorship, and the Brief Ascent of “Category III”
A New Solution to Herbert Marcuse’s Old Riddle
Leslie Stevens’ Private Property (1960): Noir’s Edge of Wetness
Long thought lost, Stevens’ grim exposé of gender roles and sexual psychopathy may be the missing link in noir’s transition to the sixties.
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