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Actors & Personalities · Directors · Uncategorized
Recently I re-watched Josef Von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934) and found myself again surprised by the sickly gushy tasteless humor of the piece; had forgotten most of the film’s[…]
Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers: An Excursion into the American New Wave, by Derek Hill. London: Kamera Books, 2008. Paperback $16.95/£9.99. 192pp. ISBN: 978-1-84243-253-2. “There[…]
Douglas Fairbanks, by Jeffrey Vance, with Tony Maietta. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press and Los Angeles, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 2008. Cloth, $45.00, 368 p. ISBN: 978-0-520-25667-5.[…]
Fred Astaire, by Joseph Epstein. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2008. Cloth $22, 198pp. ISBN 978-0-300-11695-3. Does it count as a labor of love if you don’t work very[…]
Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, by Richard Brody. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. Hardcover $40.00. 720pp. ISBN: 0-805-06886-4. It is 634 pages long, with nearly 100[…]
You’ll Like this Film Because You’re in It: The Be Kind Rewind Protocol, by Michel Gondry. New York: Picturebox, 2008. Paperback $16.95. 80pp. ISBN: 0-979-41538-1. If film is a religion,[…]
Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited, by Molly Haskell. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Hardcover $24.00. 272pp. ISBN: 0-30011-752-3. In a pique of literary inspiration, Yale[…]
Jack Hill: The Exploitation and Blaxpoitation Master, Film by Film, by Calum Waddell. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Paperback $35.00. 224pp. ISBN: 0-78643-609-3. Exploitation filmmaker Jack Hill only directed a small number[…]
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.”
