DVD & Blu-ray · Horror · Noir
A Stranger Arrives in Town: Francis Coppola’s TWIXT (2011)
How do you begin a story? If I told you a story begins with the arrival of a stranger in town, you would probably think I was talking about a[…]
Tagged: archetype
Vincente Minnelli’s Descents Into Hell
Vincente Minnelli’s reputation is that of a stylist – someone who did not author his own screenplays, but who directed whatever the studio (usually MGM) assigned to him (usually musicals), and[…]
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Fantasia (1940): The Varieties of Religious Experience
Walt Disney’s masterpiece, Fantasia, may seem at first like a random collection of animated shorts whose only common factor is that each was inspired by a well-known piece of classical[…]
Deconstructing Sucker Punch
Like Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., Christopher Nolan’s Inception, or Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch invites the viewer to deconstruct a narrative puzzle – nested realities, stories embedded[…]
Notes on a Slow Zoom: Robert Altman’s 3 WOMEN (1977)
Standing in an aquarium with his arms outstretched, the Creature from the Black Lagoon makes a cameo appearance in Robert Altman’s 3 Women, but his presence is anything but gratuitous. Like everything else in[…]
R.I.P. Jill Haworth (1945-2011)
Otto Preminger had a thing for saintly blondes. The best known of Preminger’s saintly – and hauntingly beautiful – blondes was Jean Seberg whom Preminger discovered and cast as the lead in his[…]
Bigger Than Life’s Sci-Fi Twin
No one with eyes and a brain could seriously dispute Nicholas Ray’s role as the primary auteur of Bigger Than Life. All you need to do is watch Ray’s Rebel[…]
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[…]
Disney Imagery in Citizen Kane
Watching the marvelous Blu-ray edition of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), I was struck by how certain shots foreshadowed the imagery of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941)[…]
Directors · Experimental & Underground
The Surreal World of Slavko Vorkapich
Like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Serbian-born Slavko Vorkapich (1894-1976) was not only a filmmaker, but a respected film theorist, and like those two Soviet giants, Vorkapich’s theories were mainly[…]
Anima & Animus – Revenge of the Giant Face
The amount of discussion generated by Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds demonstrates, if nothing else, that whether you like the film, hate it, or harbor mixed feelings about it, what Tarantino[…]
La Décade Prodigieuse – Ten Days’ Wonder (Claude Chabrol 1971)
Why Ten Days’ Wonder? I certainly wouldn’t call it one of Chabrol’s masterpieces. That’s a description I’d reserve for Les Bonnes Femmes, Le Boucher, Ã Double Tour, La Rupture, The[…]
Clichés or Archetypes? Trash or Transcendence?
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) – Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka gives Missi Pyle, James Fox, David Kelly, Freddie Highmore, et al. the guided tour. One man’s cliché is[…]
Women in Wonderland, Part 5 – Coraline (Henry Selick 2009)
Every one of Henry Selick’s four feature films to date has dealt with alternate realities. In the Tim Burton-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the ghoulish Jack Skellington finds a[…]
Women in Wonderland, Part 3 – Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock 1960)
The Alices in flight, those beautiful women alone in their cars on the run – Sylvia Kristel in Alice ou la Dernière Fugue, Candace Hilligoss in Carnival of Souls, and[…]
Actors & Personalities · TV & Streaming
Another Scary-But-Sexy Palin (Arche-)Type
While personally I view Sarah Palin as more Barbie-Doll-Puppet than Angela-Lansbury-style Puppetmaster (Puppetmistress?), I enjoyed reading colleague Erich Kuersten’s post on Cinema’s Sexy-Evil Palin-Types, and would like to add one[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
King of Lears – Paul Scofield (1922-2008)
Shakespeare’s King Lear is a classic incarnation of the wildman archetype (previously discussed by Erich Kuersten here and here). Lear’s problem, leading to tragedy, is not only his age –[…]
Cotillard vs. Tautou
At any given moment in Hollywood history, certain actors will fill a certain niche. One such niche is the cute little French girl or gamine. During the 1940s, that niche[…]
Year of the Wildman
We’ve had the Night of the Iguana, the Day of the Locust and since around 1989, we’ve had the years of the disaffected sheep. Now I’d say 2007 Oscar Night[…]
Noir’s Positive Animas – The Guardian Angels
In film noir, the anima (a female projection of the male unconscious) often takes the form of a femme fatale, a figure that lures the male protagonist to his doom.[…]
