“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.”
Category: Genres
“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.
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.”
TCM Alert! Myrna Loy Ahoy! THE BARBARIAN (1933) and PENTHOUSE (1933)
If Zita Johan went off into the Gary Cooper Morocco desert with Valentino as a stud MUMMY and there was 50 SHADES OF GREY UN-PC whipping and dominance head games Stockholm Syndrome romance, well that gives you some of the plot. PRE-CODE RULEZ!
Exploitation & Erotica · SF & Fantasy
Roots of ALIEN: A pre-pre-PROMETHEUS Triple Feature
If you’re excited about the promos for the Ridley Scott science fiction movie coming out this summer, Prometheus… it might be a good time to visit some of the films that have been mentioned over the years as the inspirations for ALIEN, and it just so happens they’re all pretty short and all available on Netflix streaming – a perfect weekend triple bill.
Dream Story: Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty
“The Story of O and Traumnovelle are two tales of outrageous sex that nevertheless come across as lulling and gentle. Sleeping Beauty deserves to be ranked with those works, in[…]
Directors · Genres · Noir · Westerns
Going Through the Devil’s Doorway: The Early Westerns of Anthony Mann
“Mann’s 1950 threesome — The Devil’s Doorway, Winchester ’73, The Furies — was the most auspicious quantum jump by an American director since John Ford’s equivalent Americana triumvirate of 1939 (Stage Coach, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk) lifted him into the major phase of his career. Yet Mann’s achievements seem destined to remain unappreciated and the director himself obscure.”
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
In Passing (2011) and the Remodernist Film Manifesto
“It is the tunnel vision, the burrowing into specific obsessions, of In Passing’s individual filmmakers, combined with the broad scope of the collaborative form, that constitute the film’s unique allure.”
African American · Essays · LGBT & Queer
Postlude to a Kiss: Will Smith’s Performances of Race and Sexuality in Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation
“Beneath its self-presentation as a satiric comedy of manners lie cogent interrogations of notions about race and class, the history of blacks in America, the limits of assimilation, the representations of black gay men, the nature of African American and Hollywood homophobia, and the fluidity of racial identity. Smith performs, resists, and usurps this character in order to effect certain cultural interventions and to further the cause of his public star identity.”
Auteurs in the Arena: Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire
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)
Glasnost in Space Revisited: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
“This is a winter movie, an elegy tinged with regret.”
Composers · Directors · Music & Musicals · Noir
Clashing Harmonics: The Characteristics of Sound in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil
“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.”
Directors · Experimental & Underground
Finger Envy: A Glimpse into the Short Films of VALIE EXPORT
“EXPORT’s antagonistic body undergoes a bloody rebirth, her mutilation inhibiting the screen’s attempt to dominate the body and recentering a commodified humanity whose “eros” struggles to leave its sanguine imprint.”
Two Cinematic Visions of the Inca Conquest: The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Aguirre: Wrath of God
“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.”
Actors & Personalities · Essays · War
Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair: Marlene Dietrich’s Star Persona and American Interventionist Strategies in Postwar Berlin
“I read so much about immigrants, how they must adjust to customs and the words of foreign lands. Maybe because I was never treated like an immigrant! Nobody made excuses for me. Not then – not now. Nobody cares about my roots.”1 – Marlene Dietrich, April 15, 1985
La Bete Humaine: Runaway Train
“The train is a symbol for whatever you want it to be,” the film’s director, Andrei Konchalovsky, explains. “It can be viewed as a prison because they can’t get out of it, or considered as freedom because they escaped from prison on it, or considered as our civilization running out of control because no-one can stop it.”
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