The Greenest Green World: James Cameron’s Avatar
“Cameron is Hollywood’s dream boy: a superficial auteur with impeccable brand recognition.”
Category: Genres
Hollywood’s Nightmare, Not Ours: On The Mist, Story (1980) and Film (2007)
Director Frank Barabont hijacks — and sinks — Stephen King’s powerful allegory of political oppression
Old Cameron’s Avatar: America’s Favorite Asshole Makes Another Kick-ass Thriller
Vampires? Yeah, we’ve got that. Oh, and Michelangelo too
Horror · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad: John Hillcoat’s The Road
“Hillcoat and his crew have taken the book’s hints and modeled their scavenging pair on contemporary images of homeless people, who already, as Hillcoat aptly puts it, are ‘living that apocalyptic world of day-to-day survival on the streets with no money and no food.'”
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Fred Astaire, Two Steps Forward and One Step Back: Fred and Vera-Ellen, Not Quite Walking on Air in The Belle of New York
Can quantity trump quality? Not so much
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Rudolph Valentino: Dream Lover
“Valentino said there’s nothing like tile for a tango!” — Norma Desmond to Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Towards a New Cinema of Castration: I Spit on Your Grave and Only Angels Have Wings
“Peer pressure is either a boon or a bitch with the power to destroy the world, or save it.”
Val Lewton’s Symbolic Statuary: A Photo Essay
“It was once the figurehead of a slave ship. That’s where our people come from. From the misery and pain of slavery.” ~ I Walked with a Zombie
Serious Joke: The Coen Brothers’ Emergence as Jewish Humorists
“The films of the Coen brothers seem to take place in a postmodern Chelm, displaced chronologically and geographically.”
Activist & Political · Reviews
Looking Back on Silence and Condoleezza: The Weirdness of W
“The result is satire that doesn’t breathe.”
Actors & Personalities · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer
Monster Queen: The Transgressive Body of Divine in Pink Flamingos
“Divine is as unstoppable as nature, destined to repeatedly transgress, destroy, and create.”
Deciphering the Indecipherable: Procedure as Art in Fincher’s Zodiac
“With Zodiac, obsession becomes the point of origin, the catalyst for artistic creation.”
Crime · Silents · Thrillers & Action
The Power of Pulp: Madness, Mayhem, and Relevance from Dr. Mabuse to Miss Mend
“The shadow of Mabuse falls over the 1926 Soviet adventure serial Miss Mend, too, but without the angst and gloom of Lang’s Der Spieler.”
The Best Sex in Contemporary Hollywood: Utopia, Ecstasy, and the (Classical) Musical Number in The 40-Year-Old Virgin
“There’s kind of nowhere else [the movie] could go.” Steve Carrell
Inimitable Charm: Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox
“Anderson, like Dahl, seems to have told a story to appeal to a child’s inner adult.”
Some Cameroning, Part 2 – Cameron as Auteur
Can a filmmaker spend most of his or her artistic life recycling other people’s ideas and still be a true auteur? Sure. Why not? Any idea, theme, style, or attitude[…]
Tortured Longing is the new coke
I can feel the Twilight zeitgeist in the air tonight, perhaps it’s because I live across from the cinema and the line around the block and I hear them out[…]
Past Sunset: Noir in the West
“I don’t need other people. I don’t need help. I can take care of me.”
Roman Polanski: What’s on Trial?
What is fascinating about the Polanski case is that it is not particularly about Polanski. Looking at the debate raised in France (where I live) and the United States –[…]
Playing It Safe with John Dillinger: Michael Mann’s Public Enemies
“Dillinger had recently undergone plastic surgery to alter his face and to try to remove his fingerprints. But Public Enemies does not dare to depict that kind of desperation and that determination to survive under any circumstances.”
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