The Glare of the City: Adapting The Long Goodbye
Altman admitted never finishing the novel and saw no need to remain faithful to it. For that reason, the movie wasn’t well received by Chandler fans. Most didn’t appreciate the[…]
Historical & Epic · Religion & Spirituality
“Tribune, Do You Really Believe All This?” The Somewhat Dispassionate Passion of Sony Affirm’s Risen (2016)
Risen is the product of a sub-industry whose primary source of success is in providing pious pablum for a complacent and undiscriminating Christian market (although, to be fair, this market[…]
Literature and Film · Writers & Critics
Script to Screen: Notes on Five Significant Screenplays, the Movies They Were Made Into, and the Process of Adaptation
The most substantial changes in Nightmare Alley are between the novel and the screenplay. For example, in the novel, Stan, who covets Zeena and her act, kills the alcoholic Pete[…]
Roma: A Meditation on (Male) Mobility and (Female) Immobility
Even the languid pace Cuarón uses throughout the film seems to want to elevate the (feminine and domestic) virtue of soul-nurturing stillness over the (masculine) trait of destructive freneticism. Some[…]
Two Truths: Inside No Way Out (A Gift to a True Friend)
That’s why I sing for an America that will never be back but that left us with such vivifying memories. You’re not lost, not past, not buried. You’re active, vital,[…]
Counterculture · Documentaries · Music & Musicals
Marc Bolan and Born to Boogie: The Great Unsung Rock ’n’ Roll Film
A roar grew in the wrestling room of daybreak . . . And now where once stood solid water stood the reptile king, Tyrannosaurus Rex, reborn and bopping. – Marc[…]
Designers · Historical & Epic · Interviews
Queen Anne’s Fishbowl: Discussing The Favourite with Production Designer Fiona Crombie
Queen Anne’s bed was hand built, hand carved and painted. It was 14 feet high with four mattresses and layers of beautiful bedding. The bed is a fairly accurate queen’s[…]
Before Hollywood: Max Ophüls, Curtis Bernhardt, and Robert Siodmak in Exile in Paris
Hollywood was just beyond the horizon for the émigrés. There is no doubt that Curtis Bernhardt, Robert Siodmak, and Max Ophüls thought they would settle down in Paris and become[…]
You Say You Want an Evolution: Sneaker Cinema’s Narrative and Aesthetic Ground Zero
What sneaker cinema is amounts to the sport shoe’s role in adding narrative or stylistic significance to a film’s mise-en-scene, themes, characters, or plot lines. And to be clear: ruby[…]
Actors & Personalities · Music & Musicals
Who Becomes a Legend Most? And Why Wasn’t It Betty Garrett?
“The reason I sought out Betty Garrett’s book in the first place was because of something devastating that I read – and didn’t want to be true – in Farley[…]
Drama · Horror · SF & Fantasy
Facing “Ultraviolence”: Blindness as Insight in Bird Box
Given the fact that sex and violence are alleged to be as normalized in our culture as wind blowing through the trees, in Bird Box, Malorie’s shock even appears prudish[…]
The Auteurist Stork: Alfonso Cuarón’s Cinema of Deliverance
Roma is the latest edition in what can be considered Cuarón’s prenatal trilogy, preceded by Children of Men (2006) and Gravity. This is a director obsessed with matters of pregnancy,[…]
“Downsizing” Liberal Hollywood: How the Film’s Christian Message Undermines Arguments for National Health Care
Downsizing is a dystopic satire on American values that has an unsurprising and credible core involving a sick and impoverished underclass. It is credible because the USA is alone among[…]
Actors & Personalities · Documentaries
Making Montgomery Clift: An Intimate Exploration of a Hollywood Enigma
As Robert Clift states in the film: “The people in my life who loved Monty lost him twice: in his death, and then again when they couldn’t find him in[…]
Looking for Quiet: The Other Side of Robert Mitchum
Considering Mitchum’s background, it’s forgivable to conflate his cinematic existentialist tough guys with his mythic, often dubious, real-life history. Some things are certain, though: Mitchum lost his father early, crushed[…]
Animation · Animators · Experimental & Underground · Religion & Spirituality
Making Fun: The Satiric Impulse in Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues and Seder-Masochism
In her two longest works of animation – Sita Sings the Blues (2008) and Seder Masochism (2018, currently on the festival circuit) – Nina Paley turns her sharp wit and[…]
Designers · Horror · Interviews
In the Mütterhaus: A Conversation with Suspiria’s Production Designer, Inbal Weinberg
“We need guilt, Doctor. And shame.” * * * Luca Guadagnino follows up 2016’s A Bigger Splash and 2017’s Call Me by Your Name with 2018’s Suspiria, a remake of[…]
The 59th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece (Nov. 1-11, 2018)
From volatile sibling relationships to House of Atreus–style depravity, traditional ideas about family were upended and replaced with a contemporary look at the complex, ever-expanding definition of the ties that[…]
Modernity, Melancholia, and Cultural Heritage: Johnnie To’s Sparrow
In Sparrow, this sense of melancholia manifests as an abstract nostalgia for the architecture and cultural values of an old Hong Kong that is rapidly disappearing and being replaced by[…]
Between Diegesis and Mimesis: Voice-Over Narration in Fiction Film
This brief essay will seek to answer the distinctions between mimetic and diegetic elements in a filmic text, isolate the voice-over as a unique event located between the strict division[…]
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