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The Esteemed Black Actresses Who Finally Have the Spotlight – The New York Times – Celebrity News on:
DVD & Blu-ray · Exploitation & Erotica
With Scream! it’s now possible to realize that the 80s as the best decade ever for schlock movies; grindhouses and drive-ins still lured us in like evil aunts. And best of all, we could still be genuinely scared.
For every filmmaker who is considered an auteur, there is a key work – often a first film like Welles’ Citizen Kane – that expresses in essential form most of[…]
Actors & Personalities · Exploitation & Erotica
When people die there is usually an element of shock to the news, but when I heard Jean Hill passed away this week (8/21/13) I wasn’t shocked, since her health[…]
For the discerning cinema and motorcycle repair video connoisseur, youtube has launched over 69 channels, each around $1.99-$2.99 a month.
My Lunches with Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, Edited by Peter Biskind. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013. Hardcover, $28.00. 306pp. ISBNL 978-0-8050-9725252800 The reader in search of[…]
The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century, by Margaret Talbot. New York: Riverhead/Penguin Group, paperback, 2013, 432pp, $18.00. Margaret Talbot must have known a straight-ahead biography or “a[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Horror · Noir
How do you begin a story? If I told you a story begins with the arrival of a stranger in town, you would probably think I was talking about a[…]
Set thy Tivo for: Rare Hawks, Orange-blazoned Shakes, Gish vs. Men, Glenda the kickass Reporter, Carpenter classics, and uncomfortable laughter…
Not since Gene Wilder made nice with his monster in Young Frankenstein or the cannibal mutant got the girl (Tucker and Dale vs. Evil) have our deformed horror staples been so effectively pulled from their scar tissue and replaced with loving stitches. We needed these films, like a salve to our nation’s red vs. blue infection.
The Worldwide Film Noir Tradition: The Complete Reference to Classic Dark Cinema from America, Britain, France and Other Countries Across the Globe by Spencer Selby. Ames, Iowa: Sink Press, 2013. […]
Essays · Horror · SF & Fantasy
“The choppy narrative arc of the film ends up matching the new hybrid of fast-running, fast-changing zombie: like its undead, the film moves too fast. The bitten person turns in twelve seconds in World War Z, which feels like about the same amount of time given to a story line before turning to another.”
“The whole point of Howard’s screen persona was surely its combination of the ramrod-straight and the slyly subversive, and its creation of a façade that was eternally gruff yet perpetually seemed to be in on some wonderful joke.”
“Westerns are difficult to sell to modern audiences. ‘The Long Ranger,’ directed by Gore Verbinski, follows ‘Cowboys & Aliens’ and ‘Jonah Hex’ as recent Old West flops.” — Brooks Barnes, “Masked Lawman Stumbles at the Gate,” New York Times, July 8, 2013
Directors · Historical & Epic · Reviews
“In Lincoln, the abolition of slavery is the goal of the narrative; the closing scenes are intended to confirm our notion of a historical trajectory that moves from injustice to justice. In Django Unchained, the narrative is simpler, but the notions of justice and history are more complex. The story gives no hint that slavery will ever be abolished. It presents an America that has yet to escape its foundational sin, and may never be able to.”
“Part of it is about the right to privacy, and part of it is about telling the story the way she wanted it to be told. But there’s also an underlying argument regarding the existential fact of being an actor, and the related argument of identity being performed rather than essential.”
“Although he pays lip service to the honor code of Bushido, Yonoiʼs facade of the disciplined warrior is transparent. Celliers sees through it. As Yonoi is about to execute Hicksley, Celliers challenges him in the most provocative way, with a defiant kiss.”
Actors & Personalities · Writers & Critics
Some of the films of Noël Coward, some of the films of Ernst Lubitsch, and one of the films of Oscar Wilde
” Like the titular beasts in Hitchcock’s The Birds, the zombies invade the home, the city, the culture, but even more importantly in Night, they invade the self, like a disease, an infection that takes root in us and undoes us from the inside out. In this, the story of the zombie is a story of colonization — reverse colonization to be exact, a story where the Other finally has its day.”
Historical & Epic · Reviews · Silents
“If head and heart are united, harmony can exist even in the midst of strife. Let them come into opposition, however, and chaos enters from which there is no escape and no conclusion possible except a tragic one.” — Francis G. Gentry. “Triuwe and Vriunt in the Nibelungenlied.” Amsterdam: Rodopi: 1975. p. 45.”Perception is everything. It turns villains into heroes and victims into collaborators.” — Hilary Mantel. “A Change of Climate.” New York: Henry Holt and Company: 1997. p. 317.
Activist & Political · Documentaries
“Following his interest in the cab driver with a taste for the story, not the politics, John incidentally finds out that — shades of today’s NSA controversies — his station managers have been letting the police and the FBI study his footage to aid in their search for subversives. It is also the kind of reporting, it seems, that can get one fired.”
