Percolating Paranoia: Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat
Fritz Lang brings the terrors of noir into the bright kitchens of America. Watch that coffee pot! In Bright Lights 12 devoted to film noir, Gary Morris locates the malaise[…]
Composers · Music & Musicals · SF & Fantasy
Bernard Herrmann’s The Twilight Zone on CD
Serling’s groundbreaking series was also a warm haven for Hollywood’s greatest composer Last weekend I purchased the Herrmann Twilight Zone double-CD, and I’ve played it about ten times by now[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Producers & Studios · Reviews
Roger Corman’s New World Pictures: Notes Toward a Lexicon
The beloved low-budget exploitation company sampled New World Pictures (1970-1983) was the brainchild of Roger Corman. It was his second attempt (after The Filmgroup in the early ’60s) to run[…]
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
American Independent Narrative Cinema of the ’60s: A Brief Survey (Courtesy of the 1992 Torino Film Festival)
What better way to attack the monolith of social/sexual repression than by attacking the “sanctity” of the linear narrative? “The Official cinema of the world has run out of breath.[…]
Book review: Jean Arthur, by John Oller
Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew, by John Oller (New York: Limelight Editions, 1999), Trade paper, $18.95, 358pp, ISBN 0-87910-278-0. Jean Arthur would seem to be an impossible subject for[…]
Book Review: VideoHound’s War Movies, by Mike Mayo
VideoHound’s War Movies: Classic Conflict on Film, by Mike Mayo (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1999), Trade paper, $19.95, 638pp, ISBN 1-57859-089-2. VideoHound’s been shifting gears lately. Earlier on they concentrated on[…]
Book review: 100 Years of Oz, by John Fricke
100 Years of Oz: A Century of Classic Images from The Wizard of Oz collection of Willard Carroll, by John Fricke (New York: Stewart, Tabori, & Chang, 1999), Cloth, $29.95,[…]
Book review: Detours and Lost Highways, by Foster Hirsch
Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir, by Foster Hirsch (New York: Limelight Editions, 1999), Trade paper, $20.00, 358pp, ISBN 0-87910-288-8. Foster Hirsch’s The Dark Side of the Screen: Film[…]
Book review: The Ultimate Directory of Film Technicians, by Billy H. Doyle
The Ultimate Directory of Film Technicians: A Necrology of Dates and Place of Births and Deaths of More Than 9,000 Producers, Screenwriters, Composers, Cinematographers, Art Directors, Costume Designers, Choreographers, Executives,[…]
Book review: Eccentrics of Comedy, by Anthony Slide
Eccentrics of Comedy, by Anthony Slide (Metuchen, NJ:Scarecrow Press, 1998), Hardcover (no dust jacket), $36.00, 168pp, ISBN 0-8108-3534-7. I was sure the world had gone mad when I retrieved this[…]
Shifting Sexualities: Bedrooms and Hallways
The Go Fish queen goes fishing again – this time for gay boys and the men and women who love them Rose Troche’s Go Fish (1994) was one of the[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
The Day the Bronx Invaded Earth: The Life and Cinema of the Brothers Kuchar
Forget all those other boring indie brother teams – these guys were the original geniuses of cinema’s bargain basement. The sudden death, disappearance, or withdrawal of a key actor during[…]
Chatting about Other Things: An Interview with Federico Fellini
The Master speaks on life, art, and Carlos Castaneda Federico Fellini’s fantasy world, which has become more dreamlike over the years, shows us the spectacle of life. Yet, paradoxically, the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Fred and Ginger Take Off: Flying Down to Rio
“Hey fella, twirl that old propella” Hollywood producer Merriam Cooper loved three things: airplanes, the tropics, and giant gorillas.1 In Flying Down to Rio, Cooper’s 1933 airborne musical, he went[…]
Deadly Crawl: The Velocity of Gary
The “velocity” of this misguided AIDS drama never materializes Director Dan Ireland made an impressive debut in 1997 with The Whole Wide World, a sleeper about the 1930s pulp writer[…]
American Beauty: Why It Sucks and Why the Critics Love It
Okay, American Beauty is shallow, pretentious, smug, condescending, and parochial. It radiates the traditional show-biz contempt for the talent-free slobs who inhabit American small towns and suburbia, cut off from[…]
Unhappy, Critic: Happy, Texas
Mark Illsley’s dicey debut feature about faux gay cons in the hideous heartland One sign of the maturing of a community is its ability to laugh at itself, something that[…]
Draining the Drama: Simon Shore’s Get Real
This mixed-bag British coming out drama doesn’t quite come out. A film with scenes of a trim 16-year-old schoolboy dawdling decoratively outside a public toilet hoping a trick will stroll[…]
All Roads Lead to Love: Tanya Wexler’s Finding North
A good-natured low-budget road movie with a queer twist With occasional exceptions like Philadelphia, the “AIDS movie” has been mostly a ghetto genre, so much so that many of these[…]
Beatnik Chic: Chuck Workman’s The Source
An uneven new documentary looks at all things Beat. The Beats have returned with a vengeance. New editions of On the Road are rolling off the presses; interest in Allen[…]
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