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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:
But I soon thought it through and realized any initial discomfort on my part was more a realization of the shoe being on the other foot… why shouldn’t beefcake images be as important in a magazine as the cheesecake? Both were represented pretty well on Valley’s beat: Scarlet Street was/is, is beyond any agenda in itself.
I wonder about those who can watch Jarmusch any time. They must really love life’s randomness, how we must create order in what can be a pretty disordered universe. They[…]
Double Take Dir. Johan Grimonprez The documentary Double Take is bookended by two of the scariest moments in American history: the launch of Sputnik and the release of The Birds.[…]
Call this a western exploitation film. Jonah Hex, based on a comic book series of the same name, has much more action than thought or sense. It borrows from the[…]
Hand-drawn animation, once the mainstay of Disney and other studios that created “cartoons” for popular consumption, is becoming something of a lost art. Audiences seem to prefer Pixar-style CGI. Disney[…]
In his nonfiction text On Writing, Stephen King describes the artist’s work as telepathy. Hardly the new-age type, King is referring to how thoughts can transmit though a quiet practice[…]
The Dark House (Dom ZÅ‚y) Dir. Wojcieh Smarzowski, Poland 2009 What the Inuit language is to snow, Polish is to varieties of squalor and mess. Take melina, an alcoholic’s den,[…]
Festivals & Awards · TV & Streaming
And how can you not love that Tom Cruise has made the foul-mouthed coked-up Jewish producer-type into a stock comic expression of nothing less than the highest level of Nietzschean ubermenschood in the form of his TROPIC THUNDER role, Les Grossman?
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
The Miscreants of Taliwood, dir. George Gittoes Nénette, dir. Nicolas Philibert I recently spent a week at the Warsaw Documentary Film Festival. The two films that made the deepest impression[…]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UIonNH-rz8] So this filmmaker, Johan Grimonprez, who teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York, gets the idea of creating a fictional film about Alfred Hitchcock constructed largely[…]
There’s a strange defamiliarization going on in Catherine Breillat’s films. It could result from her frequent use of a stable camera, or what must be a controlled directing style. Through[…]
America’s Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, by Daniel Eagan. Trade paperback $39.95. New York: Continuum Pub. Group. ISBN 0-826-42977-7. The National[…]
Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, by Mitchell Zuckoff. New York: Knopf, 2009. Hardcover, $35.00. 576pp. ISBN 0-30726-768-7. Mitchell Zuckoff did a clever thing in Robert Altman The Oral Biography. He captured[…]
A Short History of Cahiers du Cinéma, by Emilie Bickerton. London: Verso, 2009. Hardcover , $22.95. 156 pp. ISBN 978-1-84467-232-5. The sober, aptly descriptive title that Emilie Bickerton has given[…]
Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars, by Thomas R. Lindlof. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. 2008. Hardcover $32.50, 394pp. ISBN 78-0-8131-2517-6. No one can[…]
The pathos is never maudlin or icky, but rather soothing (thanks to Lorre’s velvety vocal delivery), creepy and a little post-modern – with Lorre’s own weird real life looks keeping him from ever ‘getting the girl’ no matter how many movies he’s in.
If any movement made cinema history into a reactionary narrative, it would be the French New Wave. A batch of cinephiles, most working as critics for Cahiers du Cinema (established[…]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhqOFWdtDdY] Remember when Jean-Luc Godard made films that were avant-garde but still, somehow, comprehensible? That was a long time ago, the 1960s to be precise. Yet, like The Big Lebowski’s[…]
Another masterpiece by the late Frank Frazetta (1928-2010), and a classic example of how Hollywood studio thinking — a misguided attempt to reach the widest demographic possible — destroyed the potential[…]
From the outset, it seems to be a bold-faced cash-in culled from little investment. In Babies, a French-produced doc which got a surprisingly wide release this past weekend, we have[…]
