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My Afternoon with Eddie Foy
I love vaudeville and old-time vaudevillians, probably because I grew up watching Hollywood musicals that romanticized that heady era when the underprivileged, the penniless, and the disadvantaged used...
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Death Is Not an Adventure: All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
On February 4th, the last living veteran of WW1 passed away in King’s Lynn, England. Florence Green was 110 years old, and had joined up with the Women’s Royal Air Force in September 1918, two months...
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When Your Favorite Movies Die (But Remain Your Favorites)
Or maybe, “You can’t go home again.” Whenever someone finds out I write about movies, they inevitably ask, “What’s your favorite movie?” I’m not sure if there’s a memo about this that went out to...
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“Movies in Comicolor”
Comic books and movies seem to be synonymous these days but both industries share a long and fascinating history that can be traced back to the 1930s. One of the many interesting offshoots of this...
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The Initiation of Stacie: An interview with “Final Girl” Stacie Ponder
Stacie Ponder, proprietor of the popular, funny and often on-the-nose-to-the-point-of-drawing-blood horror film blog Final Girl, grew up just a couple of clicks down Interstate 95 from me in Northeast...
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The history of the history of silent comedy
We begin our story at the end. The end of what, you ask? The end of silent comedy. It is March of 1949, twenty years after sound came to Hollywood and laid waste to the traditions of silent...
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Not Invited to the Oscar Ball: Overlooked Foreign Language Film Contenders
Have you ever wondered how the Academy comes up with the five nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film each year? I am always a little puzzled by the selections and wonder why some of the most...
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The Films That Changed Their Lives
The Film That Changed My Life by Robert Elder features interviews with 30 directors about the one film that inspired, influenced, or touched their personal lives or careers. While the title evokes a...
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Tarkovsky Time: Geoff Dyer’s ZONA
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) is the latest beneficiary of Geoff Dyer’s cultural immersion method. Zona, which comes out today from Pantheon Books, is a pellucid scene-by-scene ramble through...
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Too Big to Fail and yet…
Some movies bomb. It happens. Certain movies are expected to be winners with critics and audiences alike, or at least with audiences, and they just aren’t. From Cleopatra to Waterworld, studios have...
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Scanning Life Through the Picture Windows: Young Americans (1967)
In 1968 five documentary films were nominated for an Oscar but you’d never know that from looking at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences website. The site claims to feature a complete list...
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The Initiation of Stacie: An Interview with Final Girl Stacie Ponder, Part...
Last week I sat down with Final Girl blogger-slash-filmmaker-slash-illustrator-slash-slasher aficionado-slash-other-stuff to talk about her cool new slasher movie primer Slashers 101 and the love that...
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The Other Chaplin
Last week we discussed the way in which the predominant critical attention focused on the “Big Three” of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd has distorted the history of silent comedy and...
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Scenes from behind the curtain: Pam Grier.
The picture above was taken a week ago. The elegant woman sitting center-stage is, of course, Pam Grier. She was the first African-American female to headline an action film and has over 100 titles to...
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My Brush with Reel Chicago
Filmmakers dedicated to documentary make hundreds of nonfiction films every year, few of which are widely distributed and exhibited to the general public. Film festivals, cinematheques, special...
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The Films of Robert Mulligan, Part 3
This is the third part of a series discussing the complete filmography of director Robert Mulligan. Click to read Part 1 and Part 2. As the 1960s ended, so did Robert Mulligan’s collaboration with...
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In Defense of Suspending Disbelief (or: Bring on the Fake!)
Recently, I wrote a piece about my disdain for many modern affectations of cinema (and by modern, I mean anything from the last ten years to the last fifty, depending on the topic) and those included...
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10 Favorite Christopher Plummer Performances
My favorite moment of this year’s Oscar telecast occurred when a sprightly 82-year-old Christopher Plummer took the stage in a beautiful velvet suit to accept his Best Supporting Actor award. He was...
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Re: Creeps
These are challenging times for the horror movie fan. The dominance of digital technology has larded the genre with tons o’titles no one in their right mind could ever get around to seeing; meanwhile,...
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Too Hot to Handle
Too Hot to Handle—a fairly forgotten romantic comedy from 1938, a passable entertainment but not the sort of movie likely to inspire much deep discussion. Or is it? See, this unassuming movie ties...
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