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Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Canto LXII – gordsellar.com on:
The Esteemed Black Actresses Who Finally Have the Spotlight – The New York Times – Celebrity News on:
“When I told my students I have a harder time than that shrugging off Hollywood’s misguided adaptations and revisions, one said, ‘Why? Whenever you want to, you can still go back and read the book.'”
They might be learning to be human, too
“The bride is like a child who has found herself in a new body overnight. Different parts of her have been stained red, white, and gold; she bears all the carnal colors and signs — but what to do with them?”
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d.— Alexander Pope (As quoted by Mary [Kirsten Dunst])
“Bottled and packaged products were sold mainly according to static imagery and rhetorical claims. With the advancing sophistication of the cinematic age, however, we gradually developed a taste for kinesthesia, ending the false dignity of stasis. The famous Heinz commercial, featuring ketchup slowly trickling downward onto a nude meat patty, was our watershed moment, our epiphany.”
“I wish I was beside her but I’m not there, I’m gone” — from I’m Not There, Bob Dylan
“Caché lays bare a heavy psychological truth about the collective unconscious — without submitting to another perspective, we may not be able to recognize and acknowledge the abject parts of our own selves, even when they are clearly presented to us, hidden in plain sight.”
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
The James Bond series is ostensibly about a jet-setting spy drinking martinis with beautiful women and saving the world. Skyfall, the newest entry in the 007 franchise, is certainly glamorous[…]
Great drama often depends on the playwright’s ability to select (or invent) a fateful day or two in his hero’s life that symbolically sums him up and enables him to[…]
Col. William N. Selig: The Man Who Invented Hollywood by Andrew A. Erish. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012. Cloth, $60.00, 303pp, illustrated. ISBN: 978-0-292-72870-7. Anyone writing about a pioneer of[…]
Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento by Maitland McDonagh. University of Minnesota Press, 2010 (revised with new material from 1994 edition). Trade paperback, $22.95, 296pp, illustrated. ISBN 0-816-65607-X..[…]
Notwithstanding the absence of spy plots, murders, or homicidal maniacs, WALTZES FROM VIENNA is very much a film by Alfred Hitchcock. It was co-scripted by his wife, Alma Reville. It displays[…]
“Admittedly, the night lights and bright beaches of L.A. are attractive, but these are just surfaces of the material world that spellbind souls into the pits of hell, whether they be the Los Angeles Basin or San Fernando Valley. I will take my shot at warning you by using films evidencing L.A. to be hell, or damn near it.”
“The film’s main focus remains on the body as undesirable, non-ideal, open to external aggression and pollution. In typical Polanski fashion, the audience is trapped in an ‘uncomfortable visual space’ where the concept of a stable individual identity is never a matter of choice, but instead constituted by our surroundings and forces well beyond our grasp.”
Directors · Documentaries · New Media
“The whole effect is a Rand-esque, dream-like, dystopian feel. This is very much Curtis taking an auteur approach to his documentary — his creative personality is all over it and the effect is enthralling.” — from “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” review, The Telegraph, by Catherine Gee
“A purely political reading of Southern Comfort does not account for the fact that Hill is as much a visual stylist as he is a storyteller. Or rather, it does not account for the manner in which he tells his stories through his style, which happens to be more finely attuned to the spare poetics of male action cinema than any other American filmmaker of his generation.”
Essays · Genres · LGBT & Queer · Memoir
“Just by going to the movies I became, like the Final Girl, a target. A target, in my case, for bullies loitering outside the theater after the movie’s over. Having been beaten up under the marquee in sixth grade, I’d become reluctant to attend horror movies. But I had to go, despite the risk. I had to see — to see as the Final Girl sees.”
“From now on we’ll do everything together. Just one big, happy family — father [helps up Mallare], daughter [puts his arm around Anna], and son-of-a-bitch [points to himself].” — from the film
“If you can get past all these potentially off-putting deviations, Park Row offers Samuel Fuller at his most free, exuberant, and even experimental. As unfocused as the narrative is, it is essentially a realist fable, or collection of fables, condensing an entire rough-and-tumble era into a coincidence-riddled pill.”
