Abject Objects: The Sinister Secrets of Andrew Currie’s Fido
“You weren’t very nice, but I’m sorry you’re dead”
Category: Genres
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Yeah, I’m 56 and She’s 24. What’s Your Point? Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, frequently though not continuously irresistible in Daddy Long Legs
Come on, do the Sluefoot? That I can resist.
Something That Festers: The Silence of the Lambs, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the Visual Pleasures of Horror
“We’re drawn to and fascinated by horror because the genre reminds us that we have both outsides and insides, skin and guts, eyes and gray matter, ideas and appetites.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Experimental & Underground · Exploitation & Erotica · Interviews
Loving the Bad: An Interview with Frankie Latina and Sasha Grey on Modus Operandi
“Any director who shoots a grindhouse film without exquisite, triumphant, dangerous, and naked women is doing a disservice to the genre and should move into a different field.”
Metropolis, the Reconstructed Original Cut: Does It Make Sense? Does It Need To?
“The resurrection of Fritz Lang’s original cut has revealed how well this film functions with its associative network of image layered onto an adventure/SF thriller, but the reasons for its mysterious pull coalesce into an x-factor that resists analysis.”
Activist & Political · Essays · New Media
“Gekko Redux, Zuckerberg ‘Rock Star,’ and the President: Players All”: Draft Subtitle
“For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being — the self-made man — the American industrialist.” —Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
The Last American Ruffalo: Lisa Cholodenko’s Lesbian “Homespun” Family Values
“In order to rectify her own misery with judgmental, shrewish wino Annette, Julianne Moore has to suffer the shame of being caught cheating, the way Dick Cheney had to suffer the blame for all the waterboarding we needed to squash terrorism.”
Jew or No Jew? David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin tell the story of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in The Social Network
Hotasianchicks.com/aaronsorkinssweatyfantasies.html
A Funny Valentine to Crime: Where Jim Fits a Bill or Two
And Claude Rains.
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries
On the Level: The Films of Frederick Wiseman
“The wonderful paradox of the Wiseman film is that what allows the layered complexities to unfold is the leveling of everything we are shown.”
Essays · Horror · Writers & Critics
The Cinematic Islands of Dr. Moreau: Beasts, Monsters, and Mad Scientists
“There are monsters that are born with a form that is half-animal and half-human . . . which are produced by sodomists and atheists who join together, and break out[…]
WINTER’S BONE and the Rural Noir
Although most film noirs take place in an urban setting, the “dark city,” Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) shows how the noir vision can thrive almost anywhere – it is[…]
Revisiting DUNE (1984) with Sean Young
Consider the following plotline: A young man travels to another world where he infiltrates the indigenous people and adopts their ways. He is befriended by a beautiful young woman who[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
Loving the Bad: An Interview with Frankie Latina and Sasha Grey on Modus Operandi
by Matthew Sorrento If intentional camp is bad, then camp striving to be bad is even worse. So claimed Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp,” and others[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
Werner Herzog & Errol Morris Headline DOC NYC Fest at IFC Center
DOC NYC, a new documentary festival that runs from November 3-9, features more than 40 films, U.S. premieres, tributes, and appearances, among them both Errol Morris and Werner Herzog. Films[…]
Comedy · Essays · LGBT & Queer
Between a Rock and a Soft Place: Queering/Queered Heterosexuality in “Career Girl” Films of the 1950s and ’60s
“Perhaps Hollywood, in trying to engage in queer possibilities for its narratives and with its audiences, could only put up a resistance to the binaries in the dominant culture through[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Looking at Charlie – Monsieur Verdoux: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“What’s all this about good and evil?” With the release of The Great Dictator late in 1940, Charlie Chaplin had done it again. He had made a movie that, with[…]
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Film Technology & History · Movie Theatres
Haunted Cinema: Movie Theatres of the Dead
“There are no start times, there are no intermissions . . . there is no beginning, there is no end.” The movie exhibition business has always been extremely volatile. The[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Historical & Epic · Interviews
Chasing Windmills: Talking with Juan Luis Bunuel about Welles and Don Quixote
“I’d love to be Orson’s assistant again.”
Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Catching It All in Stride: An Interview with Ariel and Nev Schulman on Catfish
“We just followed the leads.”
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