TCM Freak Rarity Schedule – Aug. 22- Sept. 4 2013
Set thy Tivo for: Rare Hawks, Orange-blazoned Shakes, Gish vs. Men, Glenda the kickass Reporter, Carpenter classics, and uncomfortable laughter…
Touched by a Zombie: Warm Bodies, ParaNorman
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.
Book Review – 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
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 Lore of the Running Undead (How World War Z Was Lost and Won)
“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.”
Play-Actor: On Trevor Howard
“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.”
Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear: The Lone Ranger Rides Again . . . or Not At All
“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
Tarantino and Spielberg: Two Visions of America
“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.”
Telling Stories: Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012)
“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.”
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence: Oshima’s Pacific Theater
“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
“We’ll Roll in the Hey Nonny Nonny!” Antic Antiques to Keep a Drowsy Emperor Awake, if He’s Not Too Sleepy
Some of the films of Noël Coward, some of the films of Ernst Lubitsch, and one of the films of Oscar Wilde
When the Zombie Looks: The Human Being Undone in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead
” 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
What Becomes a Legend Most: Fritz Lang Adapts the Nibelungenlied
“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
The Whole World Is Watching: Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool on DVD
“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.”
Essays · Reviews · Uncategorized
The Life of Pi: A Politics of the Imagination
“The Life of Pi is a paean or homage to the imagination and its salvaging power (we were shipwrecked in the Great Recession and in need of salvaging) not in cyberspace but in the real conditions of a troubling offline world inhabited by our own troubled human nature.”
Lardani’s Signature: Technical Mastery and Apparent Glitch in Eugenio Lardani’s titles for Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
“These features distinguish Lardani’s credit from the rest of the sequence in a very dramatic way — unlike the other titles, which are immediately obvious as credits, it is possible to miss his credit entirely, a strange distinction to choose given his role and, according to his son, complete freedom in creating the design. It is almost as if his title card is hidden in plain sight.”
No Gloomy Ones: Double Suicide?
Or transcendent love?
Directors · Documentaries · Experimental & Underground · Historical & Epic · Interviews
Histories Private and Public: Talking with Péter Forgács about Letters to Afar
“We wanted to do a writing of history through a sensual observance of the films. By having those details opened up, we show how the daily life was — not by explaining didactically but rather offering this inner representation.”
Tip Tap: Polanski and Ophüls at the Cannes Film Festival 2013
“For some reason, works built on the masterpiece scale command instant respect, even if their structure is unsound . . . Although [The Great Beauty] looks and sounds like an epic, there is no definition in the detail — the film has been put together with hammer and tongs.”
Habitat for Inhumanity: On Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium
“Yes, there are things that disappoint about Elysium. But there is also much to relish about Blomkamp’s still-developing wit and vision, especially his parodic assumptions about future dominant languages and ethnicities.”
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Getting into Curtis Harrington’s Head: Flicker Alley and Drag City Release the Avant-Mainstream Director’s Experimental Shorts
“Being fascinated with the occult, Harrington would surely have recognized that by beginning and ending his life work with the same story he was drawing a mandala around that life, making it as self-contained a thing as one of his films, all of which belong to the “trance” tradition whose introspective mien establish the work as occurring within a given consciousness walled off in some way from the natural world.”
Links + BSA
