Combat Autopsy: Raoul Walsh’s The Naked and the Dead
“What is most disturbing about all of this is the straight, uninflected manner in which Walsh visualizes the story.” Writers on film rarely discuss the combat genre and, when they do, they[…]
Last Laugh: Was Hitchcock’s Masterpiece Vertigo a Private Joke?
“On one level, Vertigo bewitches us with eerie fascination; on another, it leads us on a wild goose chase in search of Scottie’s character. But could the latter really have been Hitchcock’s[…]
Tsui Hark’s The Blade (1995)
“The Blade is the director’s paean to the muscular, exposed male body and a virtual catalog of ways to assault it – pummeling, whipping, biting, beating, and hacking . . .” Tsui Hark’s[…]
Patrick Leung’s Beyond Hypothermia (1996)
“Her mechanistic thinking precludes her from pursuing the noodle vendor in the usual ways; she can only see him after she has killed, and her sudden appearances and disappearances in[…]
African American · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Afro Promo: Jenni Olsen’s Survey of Black Cinema Trailers 1946-1976 on DVD
“America consistently countered the growing concepts of black pride and power with a virtual army of self-sacrificing mammy figures (both male and female), pimps, whores, ‘great black hopes,’ and the[…]
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Synthetic Pleasures: Techno-Revolution or Just Another Dystopia?
After seeing this film that features everything from body and mind modifications to cryogenics to the fresh hell of cyberspace, you may want to go eat some dirt. At the[…]
The Church of Camp: San Francisco’s Castro Theatre
Every religion needs a church, and camp followers have worshipped regularly at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre for two decades. John Lennon’s famous quote that the Beatles were more popular than[…]
Directors · Interviews · Silents
Angel in Exile, Part II: Talking with Pioneering Director Allan Dwan
Outtakes from an Interview with Dwan, December 1980 * * * Fairbanks, Shirley Temple, Ronald Reagan, all the “pansies and poseurs of Hollywood” – no one was safe from the[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer
Slapstick Realist: The Cinema of Paul Morrissey
Junkies, queens, washed-up B-movie hags – these are the scintillating “family values” advocates that campmeister and right-wing Republican Morrissey serves up. * * * Much of the myth, if we[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Ollie’s Somersault: Thoughts on Oliver Hardy (and Stan Laurel)
(from Triste, Solitario y final (Sad, Alone, Final), a novel by Osvaldo Soriano, Einaudi Editore “Roll it!” Makeup had changed the fat man’s face into a clownish mask. He’s in an enormous[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Eternal Child: The Many Meanings of a Mask (on Stan Laurel)
Laurel’s mask – the goofy, sweet-natured grown-up child – had its roots in the classic commedia dell’arte. The reasons why Stan Laurel is always entered in film annals as an[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
Stealing the Clown’s Clothes: Stan Laurel’s Relationship with Chaplin
Chaplin’s most famous “creation” was his little tramp – but Stan Laurel did it first, as Chaplin knew all too well. One of the most troubling aspects of Stan Laurel’s[…]
Actors & Personalities · Asian · Historical & Epic · Reviews
“Richer Films . . .” Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954)
This epic set in the 16th century deals with war, honor, courage, and yes, that homo subtext ever present in male bonding movies – punctuated by Toshiro Mifune’s bold butt-baring[…]
Half Human, Half Garbage Disposal: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)
See Val Kilmer feed psychedelic mushrooms to the crazed beast-people! See Aissa’s forbidden jungle dance! See the terrible white monster who lumbers across the sets in pancake makeup and Bea[…]
Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
“An Oasis of Glamor in a Sea of Mediocrity”: Vegas in Space (1991)
John Waters, Zsa Zsa Gabor, The Bad Seed, Supermarionation – the late Doris Fish trawled through the lowest depths of culture for her homemade camp fairy tale. Drag queen diva Doris Fish[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Tender Fictions: Barbara Hammer’s Truth Club
Barbara Hammer continues the groundbreaking investigations into gender that started with Nitrate Kisses – this time using autobiography to tell her truths. Barbara Hammer is best known for her groundbreaking[…]
Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
“There Was No Before!” The Queen (1968)
This grimy, exciting artifact from the ’60s shows how important beauty contests were to the queens who ruthlessly – and kind of sadly – mimicked their straight counterparts. The rank[…]
Documentaries · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Gay Cuba: Beating the Bully
The U.S. must eventually come to its senses and leave this little island and its vital citizens alone. Americans’ view of Cuba is based more on the right wing’s mythmaking (a process[…]
Actors & Personalities · Pre-Code · Producers & Studios · Reviews
Public Enemy: Warner Bros. in the Pre-Code Era
Nobody “did” the Depression, or sexual excess, or populist uprisings, better than the Brothers Warner. Conventional wisdom says that before the taboo-busting ’60s, all deviance in American filmmaking was suppressed.[…]
Fuck Housework! The Bad Girls of M-G-M, 1932
Harlow, Bankhead, yes, even patrician Norma Shearer “strayed” before the Hays Code ended their fun. Feminist film historians usually focus on Warners and RKO as the prime exponents of the “bad girl” genre[…]
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