“Look at yourself,” she says, “that’s not who you are anymore.” Dedicated to Joseph Stefano (1922-2006) and Anthony Perkins (1932-1992) Anthony Perkins was dying. On March 27, 1990, The National[…]
Category: Genres
Just Another Guy on the Lost Highway: Revisiting Two-Lane Blacktop
“It’s not some metaphorical struggle between two mighty kings of the road. It’s more like a self-deceiving ritual carried out by two of its prisoners.” In their April 1971 issue,[…]
African American · Essays · Genres · Lists · Movies
Routes to the City: The Ways of the New Black Films
“It’s independent thinking without the protection of an ‘indie’ label.” While hosting the Academy Awards in 2005, Chris Rock made the following claim: black films don’t have real names. “Barbershop?[…]
Superman Returns II: Superman . . . Bush . . . Perry White . . . Karl Rove . . .
It’s all here, including the “Mission Accomplished” moment Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, which was the number one movie in America on its opening weekend in June 2006, is a listless,[…]
Documentaries · Genres · Movies · Reviews
Cultural Equity: On the Documentary Lomax the Songhunter
“Every smallest branch of the human family at one time or another has carved its dreams out of the rock on which it has lived.” – Alan Lomax It was a remarkable[…]
The Noir Portraiture of Stacy Lande
Painting influences film. Film influences painting. The portraits of Los Angeles painter and performance artist Stacy Lande (pronounced, “lan-dee”) appear equally influenced by 19th Century Symbolism, 20th Century Expressionism, and[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Writers & Critics
Sleazoid Express (2002)
Here in America we have something that, with the straightest of faces, we call our Film Heritage. What people usually mean when they invoke this solemn, unconscionably sentimental honorific is[…]
Shanghai Notes
Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai (1948) is one of the most anti-noir of classic noirs. “Shanghai” in The Lady From Shanghai means the same thing as “Chinatown” in[…]
What’s So “Existential” About Noir? (Some Overgeneralized Notes)
C. Jerry Kutner’s proposition on noir-as-genre versus noir-as-style, “We shouldn’t be asking, “Is it noir or not-noir?,” but rather, “How noir is it?,” has prompted me to revisit my own[…]
Miike’s IMPRINT
Takashi Miike’s Imprint is being advertised on its DVD box cover as “Banned From Cable Broadcast.” Although other episodes (notably, Dario Argento’s Jenifer) were partly censored, of the 13 one-hour[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Beautiful Betty
Anyone infatuated with silent film, like me, is always on the lookout for that one pre-talkie film that will win over the unconverted, and I think I’ve found a mighty[…]
BLUE FLOWERS AND BLACK
A while back, I talked about the re-emergence of Romantic “blue flower” imagery in films like Batman Begins and A Scanner Darkly. Add one more film to the list –[…]
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