Thursday, June 2 2011
Beware the Urge to Serve Two Masters, Especially One So ‘Primitive’ as the Blues
They say Bluesman Robert Johnson went to a crossroads one night and sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his guitar prowess -- but no one ever accused him of serving two masters.
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...
Wednesday, May 11 2011
How Sherlock Holmes and Isaac Asimov Can Help Purge Your Social Media Addiction
Old books and even older movies can fend off the creeping anxiety of information overload.
Wednesday, April 13 2011
Jim Carrey’s Brilliant Dark Side
The Cable Guy and I Love You Phillip Morris show what Jim Carrey is capable of when no one is watching.
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.
Monday, April 4 2011
Richard Whitman Shrugged: The Merging of Identities in ‘Mad Men: Season 4’
Military deserter, super-confident ad man, or attentive fiancé. Is there a real Don Draper or is he destined for instability?
Tuesday, March 22 2011
Flash Over Substance: ‘Broadcast News’, Redux
As in real life, the TV news industry in Broadcast News looks less like a small pond and more like shark-infested waters.
Monday, March 21 2011
Banksy’s Bare Wit-ness
Like Aristophanes in Ancient Greece, Mark Twain in 19th century America, or Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes, Banksy’s visual humor chastises power in its multiple manifestations by hauling it before the court of public opinion for a well-deserved flogging.
Tuesday, March 15 2011
‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ at 34: Still Thrilling After All These Years
What makes Close Encounters of the Third Kind stand out to this day is that it isn’t the usual UFO tale of “us vs them”, like Spielberg’s later remake of War of the Worlds; rather, it's very much a story about Earthlings.
Tuesday, March 1 2011
‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ as Motion Comic: Paper Doll or New Art Form?
Will motion comics become the digital equivalent of the film strip? Merely an interesting artifact of a particular period of media production? Or are they the crude beginnings of a new art form?
Tuesday, February 22 2011
What ‘La Femme Nikita’ Has to Say about Egypt and Former President Hosni Mubarek
La Femme Nikita's miserable and corrupted world of moral dead zones and US-sanctioned torture forces its hero to make a real-world choice between pragmatic collusion or principled, perhaps doomed, resistance.
Monday, February 14 2011
Punk Rock? It’s a Black, Jewish, Southern Thang
Punk is no vacuum, no airtight, sealed white music form. It's a repository of culture -- magnetized, manifold, and chock-full of merit – that was, and is, impacted by Jewish, black, and Southern experiences.
Friday, February 11 2011
‘America Lost and Found: The BBS Story’: A Cinematic Open Road
America Lost and Found: The BBS Story leaves no doubt that BBS Productions was one of the most important players in a cinematic revolution. These seven films make a case for keeping the canvas wide and the road open.
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.
Monday, January 24 2011
A is for Axe: The Filmic Butchering of ‘The Scarlet Letter’
As is often the case with classics, what could have been a brilliantly updated film adaptation of The Scarlet Letter was consumed by the Hollywood machine that instead spits out a shallow and action-packed romp with a glossed-over ending.
Tuesday, January 18 2011
Jack Bauer, The Last of the Secret Agents, Finally Escapes… Or Does He?
The following takes place between 2:00 am and 3:00 am, seven months after the failed peace treaty sponsored by the US, the Islamic Republic of Kamistan, and Russia. Critiques occur in real time.
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, December 6 2010
I Am Become Undead: ‘Cronos’ by Guillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro evokes a sense of literary and filmic magic surrealism, one of the core traits of Latin American creative DNA, popularized by writers such Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who probe the painful politics that often prevail in the Latin world.
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.
