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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXII – gordsellar.com on:
The Esteemed Black Actresses Who Finally Have the Spotlight – The New York Times – Celebrity News on:
“The sorrows of narrative immersion are the joys of Brechtian postmodernism …” I love the films of Howard Hawks but I’ve always dismissed Man’s Favorite Sport as unwatchable, mainly because[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · TV & Streaming
Keats, Shelley, and firm, manly thighs Ever wonder what life would be like if English majors ruled the world? A chilling prospect, to be sure, but a damned unlikely one.[…]
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967) Robert Bresson’s film, Mouchette, like his previous release, Au Hasard Balthasar[…]
“Plot keywords: drugs, glamour, party, rent boy, sex, bisexual, celebrity, con artist, male model” Say, who’s that old queen in the corner? Why, it’s John Malkovich, having a fairy good[…]
Documentaries · Genres · Movies · Reviews
For boomers, “the idea that Mom and Dad are flawed human beings with complicated histories and real feelings can be hard to accept.” The straight out of a first-grade primer[…]
“But I was accused of enjoying walking up and down the red carpet! Their rage knew no bounds.” Now 70, British director Ken Loach has for over 40 years made intimate, compelling,[…]
“Funny, tender, a little neurotic, a little erotic, and always spontaneous …” A Foreign Affair (1948) is a blunt Billy Wilder comedy set amid the ruins of Berlin, and it’s[…]
“It’s a critique that is one step away from excusing Theo (the ‘woman was asking for it’ defence) …” Matthias Glasner’s The Free Will (Der freie Wille,1 2006) is a[…]
“The Coppola ideal is a young girl trapped in fustiness: she can be an object of voyeurism without a trace of lewdness, and remain spiritually intact even when accessorized.” Sofia[…]
They saw what you did! Could anyone foresee, when six nations signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957, that this economic agreement would evolve into the unprecedented political experiment called[…]
Indigenous film, global dreams1 For most of the film critics who have given it any thought, the term “Canadian Popular Cinema” is a vexing oxymoron. In a paradox that goes[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Since my esteemed Bright Lights After Dark (and Bright Lights Film Journal) co-contributor C. Jerry Kutner posted his last entry in the (now) ongoing Nutty Professor debate out here in[…]
I’d like to join Tim Lucas and others in acknowledging the passing of Freddie Francis, a fine underrated director and one of the greatest of English cinematographers. He deservedly won[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
In a comment to my previous Jerry Lewis post, Tom Sutpen wrote: Couldn’t agree more . . . except . . . Jerry Lewis has always steadfastly denied any Martin[…]
In four films, two for Alfred Hitchcock (Rope {1948} and Strangers on a Train {1951}), one for Nicholas Ray (They Live by Night {1948}) and one for Luchino Visconti (Senso[…]
Asian cinema triumphs in this year’s D&T, Tony Rayns’s last For over a decade the Vancouver International Film Festival’s Dragons and Tigers program has provided a crucial forum for emerging[…]
Note: With so much queer media happening lately — from feature films to reality TV shows to movies-of-the-week — I decided, like Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, to “go[…]
That Obscure Agent of Misanthropy? Un Chien Andalou (1929), the “surrealist masterpiece” made in collaboration with Salvador Dali was, in one sense, a new sugar-free version of Rene Clair’s original[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian
“The women of To’s world are not just endearingly kooky, but often unacceptably bizarre and amoral in their excited reactions to events.” Five years ago, I was starting to think[…]
Hey! How did we win the Cold War, anyway? Yale? Wasps? Homoerotic subtext? Do any of these spell Robert De Niro? I’m guessing no, but Bobby, in his second outing[…]
