What is new?
Most Recent
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:
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
If you think his films are bad, wait till you see his life Among its many pleasures, the sixties opened the floodgates for cinematic sleaze. Subjects hitherto found only in[…]
Criterion serves up two more deep-dish DVDs from yesteryear Sullivan’s Travels (1941) Hollywood’s self-exams are usually dipped in acid: What Price Hollywood?, A Star is Born, Sunset Boulevard, The Bad[…]
The creator of Princess Mononoke brings his sleek Boschian vision to America, courtesy of Disney “Being enclosed, protected, and kept away from dangers, children cannot help but enlarge their fragile[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Who is that comely, vicious gal plotting mayhem from the shadows? Why, the dyke of 1960s pop culture, of course. “Lesbians have their variations from one group to another. There[…]
“I’ll do anything … ANYTHING” to save Daddy!” Introduction Based on the famous – or better, notorious – faux pornographic novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, Candy (Christian Marquand,[…]
Essays · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
A close reading points to the latter. For those who see popular film as capable of providing more than cheap visceral thrills, the dismal nature of recent writing on Attack[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
The semi-sweet smell of excess Have you got a yen for understated elegance and class? Then keep on truckin’, dude, because this 1940 M-G-M black-and-white monster/masterpiece ain’t for you. M-G-M[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
Cutting-edge films continue to be cut – or suppressed entirely – by India’s clueless Censor Board “Censorship is when a work of art expressing an idea which does not fall[…]
These “dolls” paved the way for the riot grrls of the ’80s – but were too busy kicking ass to notice Cultural memory is often about as fragmented as a[…]
LGBT & Queer · Reviews · Uncategorized
Surprise – it could be a lot worse. In a February 2002 commentary for her syndicated column “Lesbian Notions,” Paula Martinac recalls her angst at browsing through her local lesbian[…]
There are drag queens and then there are drag princesses Why would an eight-year-old boy want to wear a dress? “Scotsmen wear dresses, they’re called kilts. King Tut wore a[…]
Hollywood shows some unsuspected radical tendencies – after eight years of Clintonian “liberalism” “Hollywood is at its best when it is relating to a progressive left political force that’s already[…]
Two films of 1936, Chaplin’s Modern Times and Fritz Lang’s Fury (with Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sydney), appear to have little in common. The former sardonically depicts a man at[…]
Essays · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Parker’s “ode to bathroom humor” plumbs surprising depths Contemporary American comedy evades realistic treatment of social issues, opting instead for escape from these issues. That the bulk of racial representation[…]
“There she is, in all her beads and ribbons!” How Manhattan is Nothing Sacred? To be more Manhattan, it would have to be Manhattan. Because once more we’re on that[…]
Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, ed. and with an introduction by Daniel J. Bernardi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Trade paper. 516pp. ISBN 0-8166-3239-1. Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness continues the project[…]
Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema, by Simon Sheridan. London: Reynolds and Hearn, 2002. Trade paper. $24.95, 208pp. ISBN 1-90311-121-8. For those not in the know,[…]
In which Harryhausen’s most poignant monster mixes it up After pioneering French filmmaker Georges Mêlies, there are few special effects icons left to trip over on your way to current[…]
Documentaries · Noir · Reviews
In DVD land, the world’s your oyster – pearls included (sometimes) Cuban Story (Victor Pahlen, 1959) By the mid-1950s, Errol Flynn was enjoying the low high life of a bloated[…]
Sure Arthur Miller’s masterpiece is flawed, but so’s your mother On paper, Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s 1949 Pulitzer Prize winner, shouldn’t work. Miller intended the play as another[…]
