Ida Lupino’s American Psycho: The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
“In The Hitch-Hiker, Lupino offers an unusually sustained visual examination of the average male body that is then contrasted against the anarchic body of the Psycho. Myers is often shown[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground
One Frame Apart: On Straub and Huillet and Pedro Costa’s Where Does Your Secret Smile Lie?
“For a start, Straub and Huillet’s relationship is far from an image of perfect union. It seems to thrive on a combination of disagreement and respect, a dialectical tussle worthy[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews · SF/Fantasy
Bondage, Bestiality, and Bionics: Sexual Fetishism in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner
Blade Runner is a film seeping with representations of repressed sexuality. Every scene, sequence, and image is imbued with, commenting on, or directly a result of sexual frustration and need.[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Reviews · Silents
Blu-ray Review: The BFI’s The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925, and silent film reissue, 1929)
“Erik, like Darth Vader, is much more interesting with as little backstory as possible.” — Mike Gebert, Nitrateville, site administrator1 When fairy tales, literature, and the movies hand us a[…]
Heavy TV, Part Deux: Breaking Bad ends badly, Girls gets girly, and Mad Men explores sex, death, and ketchup
Nothing about Downton Abbey in this article By the end of season four of Breaking Bad, chem teacher gone wild Walter White (Bryan Cranston) had killed just about everyone worth[…]
Marion Davies and Bing Crosby are Going Hollywood! But only one of them makes it
“Praise the Lord and pass the absinthe!” When Marion Davies first met William Randolph Hearst, she was a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, and a showgirl she remained. She had an uncertain[…]
Spike Jonze’s Her and the Essence of Intimacy
Samantha’s voice may have a loving tenor, but the words themselves are mournful, and it’s easy to see why. So long as the two remain together, Theodore cannot live to[…]
The You and Me Inside Llewyn Davis
“We’ve consumed the romanticism of the artist, and now we’re busily consuming the history of that consumption.” It’s an accomplishment to produce a period piece whose authenticity comes through the[…]
Racing with Bruce Dern: A Memoir
“The first time I saw him – in his grungy sweats, slouching around the dim, indoor, eleven-laps-to-the mile track – he already had the snarky, shambling look that would become[…]
Hanging in a Classroom Some Day: Woody Allen, Artistic Legacy, and the Blu-ray Editions of Annie Hall and Manhattan
Annie Hall is warm, taut rather than loose, angular instead of fuzzy, Manhattan is a love letter to New York, a hymn to neurosis, and a delicate straddling of the[…]
Marcel Ophuls and the Great Big Blank: Montreal International Documentary Festival 2013 (Nov. 12-23, 2013)
“With Ophuls too we need to be on our guard, given the idiosyncratic way he shapes material. There is often a tricky leakage of voice-over between successive scenes: at one[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
Doing the American Hustle
“People believe what they want to believe because the guy who made this was so good that it’s real to everybody. Now who’s the master, the painter or the forger?”[…]
Blocked or Taking Stock? A Very Brief, Not Too Bleak Mid-Winter View (Albeit with the Aid of Spectacles)
“I now present Anthony Quinn (1915-2001) – the mighty one himself – in a light few will recognize: not Quinn the rank sentimentalist ham (or Eskimo), but Quinn the deeply[…]
Actors & Personalities · Silents
The Man Who Had Everything: The Curious Case of Jack Pickford and the New York Times
INTRODUCTION Jack Pickford – actor, director, and alleged womaniser, alcoholic, drug-user, bootlegger and all-around scoundrel. Born in 1896, Jack was the brother of Mary Pickford, the Queen of Hollywood during[…]
Blank Like a Panther: Cat People (1982) blu-ray review
“Even if Schrader would like to completely eliminate any ‘magic’ or dream-into-reality bleeding, it’s still there – the boundaries of his material threaten to swamp him at every turn, so kudos to him for at least not running in fear back behind the phallic bars of patriarchal condescension that was such an annoyance in the original. “
The Fall of the House of Warner: The Warner Brothers
“In the 1930s, Warners effectively became the studio to go to for social critique, a risky position to hold under the Hays Code when pictures could be censored not just[…]
Activist & Political · SF & Fantasy
Battleground Pandora: The War over James Cameron’s Avatar*
Avatar metaphorically attacks all martial, colonial, and expansionist histories, which have occurred at the expense of the world’s indigenous peoples and Earth’s biocomplexity. Both implicitly, through the film’s narrative, and[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grande Bouffe’s Deadly Physiological Pleasures
“To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla” ~ Marco Ferreri Francis Bacon once said: “We’re flesh, potential carcasses. If[…]
The Wolf of Wall Street: Who Are We to Judge?
In Jarhead, his memoir of the first Iraq War, Tony Swofford calls our attention to a paradox of “antiwar” films. When he and his fellow Marines hear they’re about to[…]
French Fusions: Cinemania Festival, Montréal, 2013
“No-one can get over the paradox of a sphinx head on top of a chic model’s body: the sense of this slight figure propping up a magnificent mask.” Cinemania has[…]
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