As Above, So Below – World on a Wire and The Thirteenth Floor
A MATRIX OF CONNECTIONS For a long time, I avoided watching The Thirteenth Floor (above) due to the name Roland Emmerich in the credits. Emmerich was responsible in one way[…]
Book review: Let Me Tell You How I Really Feel . . . , by Laura Wagner
Let Me Tell You How I Really Feel . . . The Uncensored Book Reviews of Classic Images’ Laura Wagner, 2001-2010, by Laura Wagner. Trade paperback, 252pp. 2010. $19.95. Bear Manor[…]
Book review: Errol Flynn, by Lincoln Hurst
Errol Flynn: The True Adventures of a Real-Life Rogue, by Lincoln Hurst. Hardcover, $35.00. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010. ISBN 0-81-08639-9. In contemporary clothes, he looked like anyone else, albeit[…]
Book review: Scandinavian Blue, by Jack Stevenson
Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s, by Jack Stevenson. Trade paperback, 304pp. $49.95. 2010. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Oh for the glory days when[…]
Book review: Film Noir: The Encyclopedia, edited by Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward etc.
Film Noir: The Encyclopedia, 4th edition; edited by Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini, and Robert Porfirio. Hardcover. $49.95. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2010. ISBN 1-59020-144-2. The consensus is clear:[…]
Just Enough of Eat Pray Love
The first time I saw the memoir’s title, I couldn’t escape the association: the concept of “pray” following “eat” was made famous by the late quip-master, Rodney Dangerfield. The line[…]
The More I See of Marion Cotillard
the more I am fascinated by her. Loved her in Mann’s Public Enemies and as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. I was even impressed by her Vanity Fair[…]
Happy Birthday, Robert Siodmak (And Sorry for all the Misconceptions)
Director Robert Siodmak was born on August 8, 1900, in Dresden, Germany. If alive today, he would be 110. In 1994, in an article entitled Beyond the Golden[…]
Russia, Godard, Frankenstein – Era New Horizons 2010
I recently got back from a few days at the Era New Horizons Film Festival in Wrocaw. When I was there, most of the excitement centered on Xavier Beauvois’ Of[…]
The Real Villain of John Ford’s STAGECOACH (1939)
STAGECOACH (1939) directed by John Ford from a screenplay by Dudley Nichols is generally considered to be the first adult Western – adult in the sense that it took a set of archetypes[…]
Experimental & Underground · Uncategorized
Sex, Death, Dreaming
The following short films, each less than one minute in length, were created for the compilation project, OneDreamRush. First, we have Asia Argento on the fluidity of SEXUAL IDENTITY. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgIgiQ-2TNo][…]
Frank Tashlin: The Animated Auteur
“Tashlin’s tenure at Warner Bros. did not provide him with a ‘cartoon aesthetic’ that could be applied, ready-made, to his features; rather, it allowed him to develop a feature filmmaking aesthetic through cartoons.”
Documentaries · Music & Musicals
Out of His Head: Vikram Jayanti’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector
“I’m dealing in rock ‘n’ roll. I’m, like, I’m not a bona fide human being.” — Phil Spector
Experimental & Underground · Memoir
Spade Work: Four Autobiographies and an Elegy: My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2008); Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2007); Hommage (Jean-Marie Téno, 1985); Gloria! (Hollis Frampton, 1979); and (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)
“Because they assume that memory is fallible and experience inassimilable, they’re more like inquests or excavations than diaries or memoirs. Instead of reminiscing, they dig.”
Multiple Senses: Tom Ford’s A Single Man
“Ford creates a unique cinematic experience in which the visual, the aural, and even the olfactory mix to produce a powerful synesthetic experience.”
Sex and the City: The Way We Were, the Way We Fucked: Carrie and Her Crew Party Like It’s 1999!
They can never really knock you off your feet as long as you’re wearing Blahniks
A Cinema of Satyagraha? A Client-Centered Approach to Film Spectatorship
“In our devotion to realism-as-catharsis, we’ve become so obsessed with psychologizing fictional characters that we forget we are the ones who need humanizing.”
Sanshiro Sugata: Kurosawa’s Elegy for the Reluctant Kamikaze
“Sanshiro is ultimately after spiritual gain — to achieve the purity he found in the moonlit flower.”
The New Lurid: Cinema’s Rape Disavowal Fantasy
“They rapin” everybody out here.” — Antoine Dodson
“It Seems Familiar but I Can’t Quite Remember”: Amnesia and the Dislocation of History and Gender in Random Harvest (1942)
“Whose stories do these films really tell?”
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