Thursday, February 2 2012
Prime Time Larceny: It Takes a Thief
Al Mundy (Robert Wagner) enjoys a reputation as a world-class thief, a glamorous burglar, a pickpocket's pickpocket. Too bad he landed in prison.
Tuesday, December 6 2011
Showing My References: On Reading Too Much About TV & Watching Too Much TV
I still yearn for a hefty volume of pages to take down from the shelf, to leaf through at my leisure or to zero in on that relevant fact.
Friday, October 14 2011
Clear! Old-School Medical Drama, Stat!
A once-popular medical drama reveals how much has changed in America's health care industry -- and its television medical dramas -- and how much remains the same.
Thursday, August 4 2011
The Guys Who Bond in the Sky: ‘Toward the Unknown’
All this aircraft is blatantly fetishized, with Bond at one point giving his plane an impulsive and passionate smack of the lips.
Thursday, May 26 2011
Share the Stage, ‘Glee’—TV Feels a Song Coming On
The history of TV musicals is richer -- and stranger -- than you think. At least three sitcoms were singing long before Glee came along: That's Life, The Monkees and The Partridge Family. Before them, well, if I could sing it to you...
Tuesday, April 5 2011
‘Cinema’—That’s Italian for Cinema
New DVD provider RaroVideo USA is coming out of the gate with two lavish Criterion-worthy releases: The Clowns and the Fernando Di Leo Crime Collection. One is nominally "arty" and the other "lowdown", but the lines deserve to be blurred.
Thursday, February 10 2011
King Henry of Hollywood
Henry King's name isn't mentioned when critics start bringing up John Ford or Howard Hawks, and yet even his forgotten and little-seen works hold up better than many of his contemporaries.
Thursday, January 13 2011
Charlie Chaplin, Tramping Step by Step
The tremendously popular Charlie Chaplin movies were played until they fell apart and flaked off the nitrate, and time's warping and woofing did the rest.
Friday, December 10 2010
Sex & Death & Rock ‘n’ Roll or, The Kids Weren’t Alright
Three turn-of-the-'70s movies, freshly available through Warner Archives, give us distorted reflections of a moment when peace, love and the "youth movement" became linked with murder in the popular imagination.
Monday, November 15 2010
Tearjerkers, Weepies, Three-hanky Pictures, Sudsers & Other Such ‘Balloon Juice’
Men's movies show us a fantasy of the man we'd like to be (Tarzan or James Bond or Sam Spade), while women's movies are transmogrified dreams of women's real lives.
Wednesday, October 20 2010
Fantômas: The Case of the Dastardly Scalawag
King of the underworld! Master of disguise! Collector of exclamation points! From books to films, Fantomas was the giddy James Bond phenom of its day.
Wednesday, October 6 2010
Hollywood’s Silent Sister Act: A Tearjerking Tragedienne, a Sparkling Comedienne
Mary Pickford was the biggest female star at the beginning of the '20s and Greta Garbo was the biggest at the finish, but in between there were none bigger than Norma and Constance Talmadge.
Thursday, September 16 2010
You’ll Never Get Rich—Bwa! Ha! Ha!: Sgt. Bilko: The Phil Silvers Show
Is there always something subversive about comedy? Only when it's funny.
Tuesday, August 31 2010
‘The Mothers-In-Law’: Just for Good Measure, We’ll Give Everyone the Intelligence of a Radish
The '60s were the most surreal decade on TV, and this show has scenes as bizarre as any sitcom, even without castaways or martians or robots or talking animals or reincarnated automobiles.
Friday, July 23 2010
The Archaeology of Comedy: Ancient Funnybones Found Intact
More valuable fossils have been unearthed from the strata of film history thanks to these Kino and Flicker Alley DVDs: a bunch of lost Keatons and one lost Roxie.
Friday, June 25 2010
Peyton Place: When Discretion Was Partly a Genteel Quality, Partly a Requirement of the Censor
A world where nothing is right or reassuring, and little will ever be resolved happily, not in 30-minutes or 30 years – TV as depression, an endless picturesque grind. Rather like life.
Wednesday, April 28 2010
The Goldbergs: The Most Jewish Show on Television
This show is an example of "melting pot" art from the tail end of the Ellis Island era in popular culture, when the wide variety of accents heard in city streets was reflected on the vaudeville stage, on radio, in comics, and wherever pop culture served the mythology of the mainstream.
Friday, March 5 2010
Reality with a Pinch of Salto
Salto, a masterpiece of Polish cinema, seems to contain much of Poland's tradition in distilled form, as well as being a perfectly Konwickian construction.
Wednesday, January 20 2010
Silent Revelations
Kino and Flicker Alley are the labels duking it out for silent supremacy, and the spectator is the winner.
Wednesday, December 2 2009
Looking Back at the Avant Garde
These two new DVDs help us take a look back at forward thinkers, and although no one will like all these films equally, the whole is an experience not only edifying but, at its most radical, even pleasurable.
Thursday, September 3 2009
Buster Keaton: The Sound of His Obsession
Bill Frisell's ambient, fuzzy, meandering guitar doodles sound like they're trying to approximate the sad stillness blowing through the corridors of Keaton's mind.
Friday, July 24 2009
You are Living in the Golden Years of Cinema
Excellent movies are so thick on the ground that we're tripping on them – but never have so many delivered so much to such an ungrateful lot.
Friday, March 6 2009
‘The City’: The Most Seen Documentary
Steiner and Van Dyke have an eye for beauty even in misery, and their compositions make this part of the movie a pleasure to visit, even if we wouldn't want to live there.
Thursday, January 22 2009
Ken Russell at the BBC
Everything here is in achingly beautiful and sharply restored black and white, everything is intelligent and witty, everything is deeply felt -- everything is Russell.
Thursday, December 4 2008
Nary a Word: ‘The Last Laugh’ and ‘The General’
The sound era added nothing thematically or tonally that wasn't already perfected in silent films.
Wednesday, October 8 2008
DIY: Takahiko Iimura
Takahiko Iimura read about the American underground film movement and began making experimental works based only on what he'd read. Soon he was a leading experimental filmmaker.
Friday, July 18 2008
American Film Theatre
In what might be called the curse of Chekhov, the common setting is a living room, the common characters a family, and the common dynamic a stew of bitter backbiting and recrimination that ultimately gives the lie to Tolstoy, because here each unhappy family seems perfectly alike.
