Music & Musicals · Reviews · Uncategorized
The Runaways Get Bio-Picked
If the brief stardom of Buddy Holly and the even briefer star of Ritchie Valens should get the Hollywood biopic treatment, then why not the first all-girl balls-out rock act?[…]
Category: Genres
Activist & Political · Festivals & Awards
Oscars II: On The Hurt Locker
As a tonic to all the hoopla surrounding The Hurt Locker and its Oscar win as Best Picture, we’re reprinting BL writer Jay Rothermel’s provocative review of the film, originally[…]
Photo Essays · Reviews · Silents
Victory (Maurice Tourneur, 1919)
More than 20 years before Jacques Tourneur took us to an exotic tropical isle in 1943’s I Walked With a Zombie, his father, producer/director Maurice Tourneur (1876-1961), blazed a similar trail with his[…]
Not Enraptured by Performance Capture?
The Avatar hype continues. There was a front-page piece in the L.A. Times today, whining – for lack of a better word – about how “unlike the great majority of[…]
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.”
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
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.”
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.”
The New French New Wave? Sex and Horror in the Modern Arthouse
“The explicit nature of this wave of filmmaking can be interpreted as a riposte to modern cultural sensibilities.”
Pinned on Both Sides: No Escape for Paul Muni’s Fugitive
“The film suggests the denial of the common worker, whose service to industry is only as worthy as his social status.”
Counterculture · Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Drawing from Life: Talking with Director George Hickenlooper
On Art, Identity, Families, Fragmentation, Medication . . . and Fulfillment
Links + BSA
