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June 4, 2026
Most Recent
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:
Essays · SF/Fantasy · TV & Streaming
“By treating the style of the original series as integral to the show — and not as a kind of regrettable defect — we can get a better grasp on the Star Trek phenomenon itself.”
Shutter Island might be the only psychological thriller abetted by a lack of interest in the psyche.
“Vestiges of French customs and family life remain throughout these films, yet their concerns testify to a rapidly shifting society.”
Activist & Political · LGBT & Queer
“The transvestite’s camp humor is here used to stress the unsustainability of the military discourses on which the justification of IRA terrorism is based.”
Crime · Drama · Exploitation & Erotica
Take your seats for a “dark-hearted, midnight fantasia of ecstatic sadism, voyeurism and psychosis”!
“The very idea of losing is hateful to Americans.”
Essays · Noir · Writers & Critics
Or Advanced Guide to Cinematic Survival?
Interviews · Noir · Writers & Critics
“[My film] is stylized and theatrical because the story is so telescoped we have a life-and-death outcome played out over 20 actual minutes.”
“I’m using the computer (Photoshop) a bit more than I like to admit, but I still love traditional illustration, watercolor and oils.”
Documentaries · Reviews · Writers & Critics
Talking heads, talking of talking heads
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
“Life isn’t short enough . . .” Laurel in Sons of the Desert (1934)
Documentaries · Essays · Experimental & Underground
“In a powerful and precise encomium, Andersen extols the virtues of what he deems to be a kind of homegrown neo-realism.”
“Superheroes live best in their own world — a preadolescent world. While an interesting experiment, it’s probably not a good idea to shoehorn too much ‘reality’ into the fantasy realm of the superhero. Ever since Stan Lee introduced anxiety into superheroes — no, earlier, since Harvey Kurtzman first trained a satiric eye on them in Mad — the question, ‘What would superheroes be like in the real world?’ has bedeviled succeeding generations of comics creators . . . Once a depiction veers toward realism, each new detail releases a torrent of questions that exposes the absurdity at the heart of genre. The more ‘realistic’ superheroes become, the less believable they are. ~ David Mazzucchelli, comic book artist and illustrator of Batman: Year One
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · War
“In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke it is written, the kingdom of Godis within man, not one man or a group of men but in all men.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals · Writers & Critics
“My God! — cried out a querulous voice within me — is it possible that we, artists of the stage, are doomed by the materiality of our bodies to eternal servitude and the representation of crude reality?” — Stanislavsky, questioning his Realistic method after a failed 1904 production of symbolist one-act plays by Maeterlink2 “The stage is art . . . There’s a genre painting by Kramskoy in which the faces are portrayed superbly. What would happen if you cut the nose out of one of the paintings and substituted a real one? The nose would be “realistic” but the picture would be ruined.” — Chekhov, explaining to an actor why offstage sounds of croaking frogs and buzzing dragonflies would not render a 1898 production of The Seagull more “realistic”3
“The filmmaker, having scrupulously established the world of film noir, queers it by shattering the categories — both narrative and cinematic — of the world itself.”
Actors & Personalities · Silents
“Lawrence had become a movie star for many reasons — gentleness, grace, that silky hair, and what Laemmle assessed as ‘sensational bubbies.'”
“We do not realize that ‘normal’ behavior needs to be explained at all.” —Laura Cosmides “Monsters today seem to be everywhere, and they cannot be destroyed. ” —Stephen Prince
He worked for Time; that can do things to a man
“At a moment when the most feeble signs of self-actualization are seen as a resurgence of feminism, Whedon shows us the melancholy and troubling side of ‘girl power.'”
