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, March 31 2011
Betty Boop and Bimbo Get Into a Sexual Tangle in ‘Barnacle Bill’
The Fleischer Studios' Betty Boop cartoon Barnacle Bill embraces the pleasures of the perpetrator far more than the fate of the victim, where a cute cartoon pup gets to be a sexual predator and stoke our prurient interest in the 'joy of punishment'.
Friday, March 25 2011
Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love: The Films of Hal Hartley
Hal Hartley's films bridged the world of art school vibes and workplace routines, elite snottiness and pedestrian punches, suburban angst and critical thinking finesse, and mixed-up politics and prolonged personality crises.
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.
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.
Monday, March 14 2011
‘I Am Number Four’: Vampires, Aliens and the Art of Movie Recycling
I Am Number Four, a PG-13 science-fiction-slash-teen-romance movie, is so faithful to the Twilight template that it could have been assembled by marketing software.
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.
Wednesday, February 9 2011
Raimi’s Last Hunt: A Brief Reappraisal of the ‘Spider-Man’ Trilogy
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy is like his Evil Dead trilogy: the first entry is self-conscious, the second is more of a remake than a sequel, and the third is so different from the first two that it almost qualifies as a different genre.
Tuesday, February 1 2011
Que Pasa, New York?
How do artists get their work done in other cities of the world? Where is it viable to live? It's probably silly to begin our investigation in New York. Just 30 years ago, New York was still opening its arms to the tired, poor, huddled masses of creatives. But now?
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.
Wednesday, January 19 2011
Mighty Morphin’ Masterpiece: One Man’s Inexplicable Love for ‘Power Rangers: The Movie’
The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers TV series was after my time, and a passing glance at any given episode was enough to convince me that it was, well, 'stunted'. So why have I seen Power Rangers: the Movie five times?
Thursday, January 6 2011
Suffragette City’s Best of 2010 Cinema
What’s black and white and blue all over? 2010’s finest films. Suffragette City investigates all of the major awards categories, offering up choices that are about as far a field from the Hollywood/Oscar PR machine as one can get!
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.
Tuesday, November 30 2010
The Devil Wears Spandex
It seems that Todd McFarlane designed Spawn’s cape to billow wildly just so that it would obscure Spawn’s feet, so that he wouldn’t have to draw them.
Friday, November 19 2010
Politicking with ‘Made in Dagenham’‘s Miranda Richardson
Miranda Richardson discusses this season's premiere feminism-themed film about the real-life strike at the UK Ford plant that challenged and changed British laws on equal pay. Just how far have we come since 1968 in the fight for gender equality in the workplace?
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.
Friday, November 5 2010
Take Your Daughter to Work Day: A Father Reflects on Years of Force-feeding Pop Culture to His Child
How will my daughter feel when her friends greet her in 2030 with an enthusiastic shout-out to Hannah Montana or SpongeBob SquarePants and she can only remember Bebop, Rocksteady, the Gentleman Ghost and Gyro Gearloose?
Thursday, October 7 2010
‘The Grapes of Wrath’: The Specter of Tom Joad Emerges From America’s Dark Past, Once Again
With the current economic climate -- increasing rates of foreclosure, evictions, unemployment, poverty and misery -- this classic story dangerously impinges upon the present to reveal the specter of Tom Joad emerging from the darkness, once again.
