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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:
“For the performer, the movie offers an even more metaphysical quandary: how do you play yourself? ‘The thing that drove me nuts,’ Andre explained, ‘is that I’m playing a character based on me. So then the question is, who am I? And which Andre?'”
“He said he might not survive, and ended with the ritual declaration: ‘I now walk into the wild.’ Civilization had ‘poisoned’ him, but the best of civilization gave him words to describe both what he was fleeing, and what he intended to embrace.”
For the Halloween devouring Other in you: Here’s a small sampling of films for inciting you or your other to an orgy of castration and Kali-esque bloodletting…
Walt Disney’s masterpiece, Fantasia, may seem at first like a random collection of animated shorts whose only common factor is that each was inspired by a well-known piece of classical[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
A documentary on the weird world of Ohioans keeping dangerous wild animals as pets (it’s legal there), this film couldn’t be more timely in the light of recent events
Documentaries · Reviews · TV & Streaming
[Editor’s note: Wham! Bam! Islam! plays on PBS on Thursday, Oct. 13 as part of its estimable Independent Lens series. Check local listings for time.] In July 2010, Dr. Naif[…]
Surely it’s a good sign that the Lincoln Center Film Society seems to be shaking things up a bit with this year’s festival. In part because of the new venues[…]
It’s not ‘rare’ by TCM standards, but its not easily available on DVD, so hey – you should maybe DV-R this if you haven’t already and then keep it[…]
I wrote the description below back in 2009 (full review here) based on a rare screening years before at the Film Forum pre-code festival. It used to be so very[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
by Bob Moricz [Editor’s note: This is our second tribute to George Kuchar, who passed away in San Francisco on Tuesday, September 6, 2011, age 69, from prostate cancer. He was[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
[Editor’s note: George Kuchar passed away in San Francisco on Tuesday, September 6, 2011, age 69. The cause was prostate cancer. He was beloved by many, and was certainly a[…]
Director George Sidney is known mainly for: (1) glamourizing women, and (2) showing the audience a good time. In The Three Musketeers (1948), he does both. The principal woman glamourized[…]
The Celluloid Closet, by Vito Russo. New York: Harper & Row, 1981, rev. ed. 1987, 1995. 386pp. Editor’s note: On the 30th anniversary of publication of Vito Russo’s Celluloid Closet, Mark[…]
Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s, by Kim Newman. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988, 2011. Trade paperback, 633pp. $45.00. The first film writing I ever came in contact with was one[…]
Shock Value: How A Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, And Invented Modern Horror, by Jason Zinoman. New York: Penguin, 2011. Hardcover. $25.95. 274 pp. ISBN 978-1-59420-302-2 By[…]
They Live by Jonathan Lethem. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2010. Paperback. $13.95. 163 pp. Any author who devotes an essay to Donald Sutherland’s buttocks has already won me over, so[…]
The Tree of Life seems to excite fanatical devotion. The reactions to the film heard, for example, on Filmspotting, from both the podcast’s commentators and its listeners, have an uncritical[…]
Do you recognize this dastardly villain? It’s Boris Karloff, playing a hostile Native American in The Last of the Mohicans (1920) directed by Maurice Tourneur. The hero of the film[…]
The Frenchman, Maurice Tourneur, and the Austrian, Richard Oswald, were major producer/directors during cinema’s Silent Era, but are hardly remembered today. These days, movie lovers are more likely to know the films and[…]
“Malick invites us to marvel at a universe created for our benefit and an afterlife in which all our cares will be resolved. The best part of the movie — Brad Pitt taunting his sons, willing them to rebel against an authority he doesn’t believe he deserves — vanishes behind a scrim of inane space flotsam, while the combination of the two endows Jack’s childhood with a world-historical weight it can’t possibly bear.”
