Hot Tube Time Machine – Fun, but Repeating on Itself
When asked about the John Hughes films in a recent NY Times interview, John Cusack played the highbrow card. Besides Sixteen Candles, in which he had a minor role, Cusack[…]
Eastern European Animation Dept. – Renaissance (Walerian Borowczyk, 1963)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAirHKywhSc”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAirHKywhSc] I think this is one of the greatest short films ever made. Containing not a word of spoken dialogue. Not only is the stop motion animation exquisite and amusing,[…]
New Directors / New Films 2010
The unpredictable, occasionally thrilling New Directors / New Films fest opens in New York City today. Locals are, of course, the immediate beneficiaries of this annual collaboration between the Film[…]
Valentine’s Day: It Sucks Being a Woman
“Traditional gender roles seem to be in no danger of evolving.” Simone de Beauvoir laid it out in The Second Sex: “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman.” Indeed,[…]
Music & Musicals · Reviews · Uncategorized
The Runaways Get Bio-Picked
If the brief stardom of Buddy Holly and the even briefer star of Ritchie Valens should get the Hollywood biopic treatment, then why not the first all-girl balls-out rock act?[…]
Profondamente Italiano: Mid-August Lunch (Pranzo di Ferragosto)
If you want an idea of real Roman life, look no further than Mid-August Lunch (2008). Gianni (Gianni Di Gregorio, who directed, scripted and stars) and his 93-year-old mother Valeria[…]
Peter Graves – The Night of the Hunter
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mi2Dusyg5A In a film career that spanned more than half a century, the late Peter Graves (1926-2010) was a dependable leading man, often at his best in non-leading roles, who[…]
Poster Comparison No. 8 – The Holy Man and the Cataclysm
I like these two movie posters, one for Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), the other for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), and I suspect their similarity is anything but[…]
Revanche (Criterion Collection)
Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann likes to capture rooms and the lives within. His camera remains stable or abruptly shifts, as if just discovering the element central to the layout. At[…]
Activist & Political · Festivals & Awards
Oscars II: On The Hurt Locker
As a tonic to all the hoopla surrounding The Hurt Locker and its Oscar win as Best Picture, we’re reprinting BL writer Jay Rothermel’s provocative review of the film, originally[…]
Oscars I: That Damn Helen Mirren!
I mean, DAME Helen Mirren. (Photo via Associated Press. Joke via Oscar co-host, Steve Martin.) Very happy for Kat B and The Hurt Locker. Worst Award of the Evening – The[…]
Charge of the White Elephant
What Jacksin’s doin’ with line and cullah goes beyond abstrackshin.
Book review: Chaplin, by Simon Louvish
Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey, by Simon Louvish. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, 2009. Hardcover. $27.99. 412pp. ISBN 987-0-312-58169-5. Do we really need another book about Charlie Chaplin?[…]
Book review: Thank Heaven, by Leslie Caron
Thank Heaven: A Memoir, by Leslie Caron. New York: Viking, 2009. Paperback $25.95, 288pp. ISBN: 0-67002-134-2. When Leslie Caron came to Los Angeles in 2009 on a book tour for her[…]
Book review: The Moment of Psycho, by David Thomson
The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, by David Thomson. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Hardcover. $22.95. 183pp. ISBN 978-0-465-00339-6. Feeling a little psycho these[…]
Book review: Femme Fatale, by Dominique Manon and James Ursini
Femme Fatale: Cinema’s Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies, by Dominique Manon and James Ursini. New York: Viking, 2009. Paperback $24.95, 400pp. ISBN: 0-87910-369-8. Hammer Glamour, by Marcus Hearn. London: Titan Books, 2009. Hardcover, $29.95,[…]
Photo Essays · Reviews · Silents
Victory (Maurice Tourneur, 1919)
More than 20 years before Jacques Tourneur took us to an exotic tropical isle in 1943’s I Walked With a Zombie, his father, producer/director Maurice Tourneur (1876-1961), blazed a similar trail with his[…]
Not Enraptured by Performance Capture?
The Avatar hype continues. There was a front-page piece in the L.A. Times today, whining – for lack of a better word – about how “unlike the great majority of[…]
The Best Sex in Contemporary Hollywood: Utopia, Ecstasy, and the (Classical) Musical Number in The 40-Year-Old Virgin
“There’s kind of nowhere else [the movie] could go.” Steve Carrell
Love Among the Insects: The Pioneering Animation of Ladislaw Starewicz, One Hundred Years Later
“His insects lie, cheat, steal, get drunk, have affairs, and fight with each other, occupying a harsh reality where bad choices have bad consequences and dead things stay dead.”
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