What is new?
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:
Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years, by Cari Beauchamp. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2009. Hardcover $35.00. 528pp. ISBN: 1-400-04000-0. Previous books on Joseph Patrick Kennedy, of which there are many,[…]
Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series), ed. Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2007. Paperback $16.95. 288pp. ISBN: 0-812-69634-4. The aim[…]
Hollywood’s Ancient Worlds, by Jeffrey Richards. New York: Continuum, 2008. Hardcover $29.95. 227pp. ISBN: 1847250076 The “ancient world” epic has been one of cinema’s most curious. For every major auteur and[…]
Maybe this has happened to you: you’re watching a film, dum de dum, suddenly… METHOD! Where did it come from and where does it go when it’s gone? Let’s take[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Once upon a time a strange sassy redhead with a big nose and giant lips cropped up as a pathetic obsessed fan in Martin Scorcese’s heavy-handed satire The King of[…]
The 1970s remains, in my experience at any rate, the pinnacle for mainstream liberal understanding of slavery and the African American experience. As a child I remember being blown completely[…]
Film Criticism 101: Why You Should Recycle the Promo Packet To be sure, there are many distinct methods of film criticism that might be employed with equal, and mutually exclusive,[…]
All stars are subject to fits of madness, and if you date a daytime TV talkshow host for long enough, who knows what kind of depths of self-confessional martyrdom you[…]
Actors & Personalities · Documentaries
“Toback, to his credit, and despite the empathy he feels toward his subject, doesn’t pull his punches.”
Actors & Personalities · Interviews · Sports
“And then he said, ‘It’s like a Greek tragedy. The only problem is, I’m the subject.'”
“Tex Avery — Arch Radicalizer of the Hollywood Cartoon” consists of slightly glorified program notes that I wrote for the Zagreb Animation Festival in 1978. It was a big hit in the Old World and was published in Russian, Croatian, Dutch, French, and Italian (twice), but the only time it ever got printed in English was by Gary Morris in his cinephile-revered rag called Bright Lights. Now, thirty-one years later, Mr. Morris has decided to reissue the piece online. I have forgone attempting any actual rewrites, though, because the observations have not dated especially egregiously, except for my discussion of the then-current state of cartoon criticism. The biggest faux pas contained herein is my overconfident assertion that cel animation would inevitably dominate the future of the medium (oops – maybe not), as CGI was then but a distant pixel on the historical horizon.
“This situation requires the filmmakers to be more creative in handling their mostly simple stories, which sometimes are so simple as to seem very modern and minimalistic.”
Actors & Personalities · Asian · Silents
“This is an actress who shows excitement down to the curl of her fingers, and whose face reveals every kind of mercurial change.”
Essays · LGBT & Queer · Photo Essays
“Be aware: there are forces at work here of which we have no knowledge.”
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica
“Nude on the Moon’s exploitation is as innocent as the Good Christo-Nudist’s reclaiming of a pre-figleafed (albeit non-recreational) Eden.”
Except whether to laugh or cry
Note: The humble program note has a long and noble history. Sometimes anonymous, sometimes not, cheered as often as they were reviled, these brief, ephemeral, often illuminating handouts, likely destined for the dustbin the same night they appeared, offer “wisdom in a nutshell,” as one of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s characters aptly put it. This article is the second in Bright Lights’ series of vintage program notes from those heady days of the 1970s when unstoppable auteurists started their own cine clubs and commandeered movie theaters to bring their idea of cine-culture to audiences. Our late friend Roger McNiven continues the series with fascinating write-ups of two more works on the subject of “women larger than life,” in this case Allan Dwan’s Slightly Scarlet and The Woman They Almost Lynched, screened at the legendary Thalia Theatre in New York City on Tuesday, December 4, 1979. We have added images but not edited the text, deferring to the time and spirit in which it was written.
Actors & Personalities · Interviews
“I told Hitchcock, ‘I do miss my horse.'”
