The Real Villain of John Ford’s STAGECOACH (1939)
STAGECOACH (1939) directed by John Ford from a screenplay by Dudley Nichols is generally considered to be the first adult Western – adult in the sense that it took a set of archetypes[…]
Category: Genres
Experimental & Underground · Uncategorized
Sex, Death, Dreaming
The following short films, each less than one minute in length, were created for the compilation project, OneDreamRush. First, we have Asia Argento on the fluidity of SEXUAL IDENTITY. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgIgiQ-2TNo][…]
The Energy of an Era: Revisiting Ken Russell’s The Devils
“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?”
Maximum Security: Film Noir, Domesticity, and the Female Captive
“While films about men with dangerous jobs showed them returning home to supportive, contented wives, films that focused on domestic settings showed women caught in oppressive relationships or warped by the narrowness of their emotional lives.”
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Hitchcock’s Shadow: On Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take
“The doubled Hitchcock mirrors the Hitchcock double, who in turn reflects Hitchcock pretending to play himself.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Pierre Etaix: Revisiting a Forgotten Master
“The man’s a genius!” —Jerry Lewis
The Sound of Silence: The 2010 San Francisco Silent Film Festival
“Even the most obscure titles drew impressive crowds, and the premiere events boasted sold-out houses.”
Directors · Interviews · Music & Musicals
Family Remains: An Interview with Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler on Documenting Fishbone in Everyday Sunshine
“Being middle-age rock and rollers, just trying to pay the bills, isn’t an easy lifestyle.”
Interviews · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
Back to the Futuristic: An Interview with Bill Warren
In which the author talks about being a lifelong SF movie freak and updating his seminal SF compendium Keep Watching the Skies! for the new millennium
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
Paging Groucho! Notes on Morrie Ryskind and HUAC
“Being Marxist in the Groucho rather than Karl sense would have required the Ten to not take themselves or their politics so seriously.”
Things Fall Apart: On The Wild Bunch and Contemporary Westerns
“There remain only intimations of squalor and suffering, of rough beasts stumbling across the landscape without any stability or security in sight.”
Perverse Pianists: How They Do It
“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.”
Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
History, Herstory, Our Story: The 2010 QDoc International Film Festival in Portland, Oregon
“She had a lot of action inside!”
The New Lurid: Cinema’s Rape Disavowal Fantasy
“They rapin” everybody out here.” — Antoine Dodson
Sanshiro Sugata: Kurosawa’s Elegy for the Reluctant Kamikaze
“Sanshiro is ultimately after spiritual gain — to achieve the purity he found in the moonlit flower.”
SF & Fantasy · Thrillers & Action
“Let’s Call It a Draw”: M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender
“Most of the major speaking roles are indeed pwned by people without color, to put it indelicately. But the rest are thankfully brought to life by a rainbow coalition of talent.”
Multiple Senses: Tom Ford’s A Single Man
“Ford creates a unique cinematic experience in which the visual, the aural, and even the olfactory mix to produce a powerful synesthetic experience.”
Counterculture · Essays · SF & Fantasy
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”: Avatar’s Psychedelic Fantasy
“What entertains us may be shaping us.”
Experimental & Underground · Memoir
Spade Work: Four Autobiographies and an Elegy: My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2008); Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2007); Hommage (Jean-Marie Téno, 1985); Gloria! (Hollis Frampton, 1979); and (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)
“Because they assume that memory is fallible and experience inassimilable, they’re more like inquests or excavations than diaries or memoirs. Instead of reminiscing, they dig.”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
A Few Steps Shy of a Masterpiece: Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse Apply Themselves in The Band Wagon
“She came at me in sections . . . she was bad . . . she was dangerous . . . she was my kind of woman.”
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