Animation · Crime · TV & Streaming · Westerns
TV Notes: Bandits, Crime Fighters, and Bounty Hunters
“When you come at the king, you best not miss.”
When Luck Runs Out: Preston Sturges’ Gallic Swan Song
“I have always contended that in addition to talent, success depends on a little bit of luck, and my luck seemed to have run out, professionally at least.” –Preston Sturges, on the making of The French, They Are a Funny Race1
Activist & Political · Documentaries
Troubled Waters: Crashing into The Cove
“To twist Gayatri Spivak’s famous phrase, it’s a case of (mostly) ‘white men saving cute dolphins from yellow men.'”
Portrait of a Soundscapist: An Interview with Peter Strickland
“I had to allow time to let experience ferment inside me, and by then you forget whether what you went through was useful or not!”
Essays · SF/Fantasy · TV & Streaming
Minimalist Magic: The Star Trek Look
“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.”
Outstanding Defense Mechanisms: The Phrenology of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island
Shutter Island might be the only psychological thriller abetted by a lack of interest in the psyche.
Tout Ne Va Pas Bien: Rendez-vous with French Cinema 2010
“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 Irish Queer vs. the IRA Macho in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto
“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
Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom: An Introduction
Take your seats for a “dark-hearted, midnight fantasia of ecstatic sadism, voyeurism and psychosis”!
In Praise of Dangerous Men: Patton (1970)
“The very idea of losing is hateful to Americans.”
Essays · Noir · Writers & Critics
Ossessione: Shabby Little Shocker?
Or Advanced Guide to Cinematic Survival?
Interviews · Noir · Writers & Critics
A Writer’s Evolution: An Interview with Eddie Muller
“[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.”
“What More Could a Boy Want?” An Interview with Artist Jim McDermott
“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
“Riveting”* — Not! Gerald Peary’s For the Love of Movies — The Story of American Film Criticism
Talking heads, talking of talking heads
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
Nuts and Nice Messes: On Laurel and Hardy
“Life isn’t short enough . . .” Laurel in Sons of the Desert (1934)
Documentaries · Essays · Experimental & Underground
Los Angeles in Theory and Practice: Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself
“In a powerful and precise encomium, Andersen extols the virtues of what he deems to be a kind of homegrown neo-realism.”
“A Walking Childish Id”: Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass
“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
Looking at Charlie: The Great Dictator: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“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
Boris Godunov in America: Notes on a Meyerhold Production Resurrected*
“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
“Fucking Queer”: Eastern Promises and the Traditions of Noir
“The filmmaker, having scrupulously established the world of film noir, queers it by shattering the categories — both narrative and cinematic — of the world itself.”
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