Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Funny Face! Audrey Hepburn’s Fabulous Fifties Fashion Frolic! Also Starring Fred Astaire
Paris! Gershwin! Been there! Heard that!
Category: Movies
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
In Passing (2011) and the Remodernist Film Manifesto
“It is the tunnel vision, the burrowing into specific obsessions, of In Passing’s individual filmmakers, combined with the broad scope of the collaborative form, that constitute the film’s unique allure.”
Auteurs in the Arena: Anthony Mann’s The Fall of the Roman Empire
It’s thumb’s up and thumb’s down for Mann’s sprawling, fascinating, multi-auteur epic that inspired “bone-headed” imitations from Ridley Scott (Gladiator) and Mel Gibson (Braveheart)
Glasnost in Space Revisited: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
“This is a winter movie, an elegy tinged with regret.”
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Four Polish Cinema Classics: Innocent Sorcerers, Goodbye, See You Tomorrow, Eroica, Night Train, A Trip to the Moon, The Spiders
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
Through a Glass Darkly: On Béla Tarr’s Damnation
“You’re standing alone at the entrance to the tunnel to an enchanting world, because you know something I can’t even put a name to. Something deeper and more ruthless than even I can understand.”
Autogyros and Zeppelins: How Cinematic They Fly
Who wouldn’t love to go to L.A. from NYC via zeppelin? So what if it takes a week? Open air rear observation compartments! Farmers looking up, amazed, waving, scratching their heads in disbelief… rivers, lakes, Montana…
Fun and Hunger Games. And Other Reality Shows.
For a science fiction film francise to become truly successful, it helps not to be too original. The most successful of these franchises are based on ideas that have been floating[…]
VistaVision Makes Sense now: TO CATCH A THIEF (1955) on Blu-Ray
istaVision, it’s also what Hitch shot VERTIGO on… and now both those films too make more sense, VERTIGO especially always seemed too traveloguey for a supposed top ten of all time classic. Now, if it was on Blu-Ray I’d get it even though the DVD version I have is pretty damned good and I don’t even really love it… yet
Horror · Reviews · TV & Streaming
FridayLight NetfixStreamFest: The Corman-Price Poe Cycle
Price’s florid hamminess fills in the sparse patches of Corman’s sometimes spare mise en scene, and the sparseness conversely gives Price lots of room to floridly ham. Add Les Baxter’s crazy scores, some good freaky psychedelic California painters to make the portraits of dead and evil
uncles and incestuous sisters and flowing red paint credits, and sharp scripts by Richard Matheson and pre-CHINATOWN Robert Towne, and viola!
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews · TV & Streaming
Sex, Drugs and Germans: 6 Hidden Gems of Netflix Streaming
Homicidal gang debs, tripping youth, murderous charismatic hippie cult leaders,German lesbian junkie spies, sexy German terrorists: 6 Rare, Strange, awesome films (all on Netflix Streaming) from or about the late 60s-early 70s.
Activist & Political · African American · Reviews
Scatological Cinema, or Why The Help Stinks
Only white Hollywood would make a mainstream movie where toilets and shit are used as significant tropes to tell a story of black-white relations, as if the topic is right up black folks’ alley.
The Connectitrons Are Coming! But wait a minute, weren’t they here all along?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single species in want of heart, brains, and courage stands in need of the Connectitrons — or, at least, the good version[…]
Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: Birth of a Nation, Way Down East, Medea, Bellflower, Touch of Evil
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
Mind over Mother: Ecstasy and Cruelty in Brian De Palma’s Carrie
“One reason for [Carrie’s] success in both print and film, I think, lies in this: Carrie’s revenge is something that any student who ever had his gym shorts pulled down in Phys Ed or his glasses thumb-rubbed in study hall could approve of. In Carrie’s destruction of the gym . . . we see a dream revolution of the socially downtrodden.”2
Activist & Political · Reviews
The Plague 2.0: On Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion
“The original industrial accidents as, for instance, the derailment of a train or the crash of an airplane, were all specific, localized, and particular accidents. They were taking place at a certain place and at a certain moment in time. Now, however, the revolution of instantaneous transmissions brought about by telecommunications makes the accident global.” — Paul Virilio
Burning Down the House: The 52nd Thessaloniki International Film Festival (2011)
“It is within this vortex of social and political upheaval that Greek filmmakers have found some traction, creating sharp, insightful works that raise awareness while revealing unflattering truths about Greek society and the current ‘crisis.'”
Cinema Is Magic (also, Clocks and Trains): On Martin Scorsese’s Hugo
“‘If you ever wonder where your dreams come from, look around: this is where they’re made.’ Maybe the value of Scorsese’s film lies exactly in this sentence and the context in which it is delivered.”
From the Sublime to the Romantic: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia
“To call any work of von Trier’s life affirming, especially one that ends in, of all things, the apocalypse, must seem seriously misguided. Life affirmation in von Trier? The most notoriously nihilistic director of his generation? But surprising as it sounds, a close reading of the film reveals that this reevaluation is just what he is after.”
The Bird Identity: Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol
“Some of the most refreshing aspects of Ghost Protocol are the ways in which it defies so many of the accepted conventions of modern action movies, most of which can probably be attributed to Bird’s economic and meticulous mise en scène.”
Links + BSA
