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Clyde Ware and No Drums, No Bugles
The independent film Winter’s Bone received four Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture, which illustrates one reason why the Oscars matter. Oscar recognition ensures increased...
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Film Comment Selects 2011 (plus a note on UNKNOWN)
In its 11th year, the Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center, which runs February 18th – March 4th, is as staunchly idiosyncratic as ever. The slate is chosen by the venerable magazine’s...
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Vincente Minnelli’s Metaphysical Musical
I’ve been thinking about Vincente Minnelli’s films a lot lately. It started around the holidays after I caught one of my favorite Minnelli musicals, Meet Me In St. Louis (1944), playing on TCM one...
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The Passion of Billy Jack
Once again, our rootless reporter David Konow takes the stage with a piece written for but never published by the defunct Geek Monthly, which we at The Movie Morlocks are proud to present now for the...
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THE GIRL SAID NO (and so do I)
This is the story of one of the least funny (or most not funny) comedies I’ve ever forced myself to sit through. A film so profoundly insulting and hateful that it almost exceeds my ability to imagine...
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Oscar’s Shorts
Today marks the 83rd Academy Awards Show. Last year some 42 million viewers tuned in to watch the hoopla. While this is far behind the 111 million mark achieved here in the U.S. by those watching the...
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John Barrymore: Gene Fowler’s Sweet Prince, Part 1
“For each man carries within his own memory a special golden age. Then, when he becomes old enough to seem secure against rebuttal, he tends to make a shining legend of that time. He feels ordained to...
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The Horror: Only the Valiant
The next few months promise an embarrassment of film criticism riches. On March 15th, J. Hoberman’s An Army of Phantoms drops, the second entry in his breathless and exhaustive cultural history of Cold...
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Authority Is the Child of Obedience
Are human beings inherently cruel or do we learn cruelty by example? Does our genetic makeup dictate our personalities at birth or are we shaped by numerous circumstances including our environments and...
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You gotta be in to win: Budd Boetticher’s BEHIND LOCKED DOORS
Everybody loves a good trapped in the sanitarium movie, don’t they? You know the drill – some smart so-and-so either gets themselves committed to an asylum to sniff out corruption or some bright-eyed...
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How to offend everybody in one easy step
Last week I posted an essay about 1930′s comedy star William Haines, and ignited some impassioned responses in the comments area from some Haines supporters who took umbrage at what I wrote. I like to...
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Lost in the Outback – Ted Kotcheff’s WAKE IN FRIGHT
Retitled and released as Outback in the U.S. and Great Britain in 1971, Ted Kotcheff’s WAKE IN FRIGHT was barely noticed by American critics and moviegoers and quickly vanished from screens. What...
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John Barrymore: Gene Fowler’s Sweet Prince, Part 2
“If you find this book hard to read, please consider, it also was hard to write it.” So notes Gene Fowler(left) near the end of Good Night, Sweet Prince, his biography of his good friend John...
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Digging Through the Warner Archive: Wild Rovers and Restored Minnelli
Despondent cineaste Jack Andrus should buck up. First, he’s seated in an eye-blazingly Technicolor red chair, which one assumes is also of sensuously high-grain leather. Second, he’s being played by...
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Hollywood’s First Woman of Photography: Ruth Harriet Louise
Photographer Ruth Harriet Louise in her studio with actress Joan Crawford You might not be familiar with her name but you’re probably familiar with her work. Ruth Harriet Louise’s glamorous photos of...
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Guts suitable for framing
If you were a young boy growing up in the 60s (and perhaps even a young girl, of the feisty, scratched knees sort, with a bit of the good earth under your nails and a can-do attitude) then chances are...
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The Things That Came and Went
“It was the silliest of movies.” That was how H.G. Wells described Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS. Wells went on to detail, with the maddening precision and relentless nit-pickery of the true geek,...
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From REPO MAN to Westerns: A Conversation with Alex Cox
Alex Cox was born in Liverpool and later moved to the U.S. and went on to direct some of the most iconoclastic arthouse films of my youth with titles like Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Straight to Hell, and...
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Once Upon a Time . . .
I am inclined to think that a good fairy tale is wasted on children, especially in today’s world where indulgent parents have created generations of over-stimulated progeny who are more interested in...
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J. Hoberman’s An Army of Phantoms
Under siege. John Ford’s Fort Apache established one of the major Cold War film archetypes, as J. Hoberman explains in An Army of Phantoms, his breathless, careening cultural history of the period...
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