Parallax View

The zombie film is essentially defined by inexplicable plague and no hope of a cure. It’s just about survival, and frankly that’s a losing battle when the world is quite literally overrun with undead eating machines infecting everyone they bite. World War Z, the sprawling, big-budget adaptation of the Max Brooks fictional history of the coming plague, takes a different approach. It’s about staunching the spread of the plague, searching for a cure and saving not just a few hardy survivors but the entire human race. Brad Pitt is the U.N. specialist searching for ground zero, the source of the plague, because the only hope for a cure is in the source.

In the real world, the source of a contagious disease is essential to understanding the nature of the threat, before it has mutated through transmission, and to track its spread. In the movie world, such details lend a sense of urgency to the story and plenty of opportunities for dramatic obstacles and cinematic action. The globe-trotting Mr. Pitt might want to take notes on how some of these medical heroes fight plagues and pandemics in the center of the hot zone of outbreaks, and what kind of obstacles he may face in his medical adventure.

‘Panic in the Streets’

“Panic in the Streets” (1950)

Infection: Bubonic plague
Transmission: Human contact
Cinematic symptoms: Low life thugs even more sweaty and twitchy than usual
Breeding ground: New Orleans

Method man Elia Kazan directed this unusual outlier in the shadowy crime genre we know today as film noir. There’s a murder and a couple of killers on the run, but what makes them so deadly is that they are carrying and spreading a highly infectious strain of bubonic plague through the underworld of the New Orleans waterfront. There had been plenty of films about courageous doctors fighting deadly epidemics, but Richard Widmark’s public health officer is more action hero and crusading detective as he tracks the contagion to the source. The film even equates the underworld criminals (Jack Palance and Zero Mostel) as literal vermin: rats scurrying through the dark alleys and waterfront dives spreading disease as they scavenge the streets. It certainly makes the case for crime as a disease in our midst.

Prognosis: Predict a full recovery, thanks the bare-knuckle commitment of our public health officials.

Continue reading at MSN Movies

The same year that  An American Werewolf in London opened up the possibilities of the werewolf horror with a mix of black comedy and horrific transformations, Joe Dante went a different direction with The Howling (Shout Factory). Working on lower budget, Dante discarded the usual lone wolf route to frame the drama in terms of the wolf pack. His wolves weren’t mad dogs on the rampage, but a primal force balancing survival with primal urges.

Dee Wallace, just a year before making E.T., stars as an investigative TV reporter recovering from a brush with a serial killer in a retreat called “The Colony,” a mix of new age commune, primal therapy, and red meat culture run by psychiatrist Patrick Macnee. It also happens to be the hub of a werewolf pack that quickly adds her husband (Christopher Stone) to their ranks, transforming the easy-going vegetarian into an aggressive, meat-eating hunter in the process.

It’s more clever than compelling, to be fair, an interesting take with inventive effects (thanks to Rob Bottin), impressive moments of horror, an undercurrent of dark humor, and an earthy, feral sensibility. John Sayles (who previously wrote Piranha for Dante) came with Dante from the Corman movie factory and contributes a clever script (adapted from a novel by Gary Brandner) with some character nice touches in the supporting roles and a modicum of wit in the dialogue.

Read more »

Stoker (Fox) – Hollywood is always drafting new talent from abroad, especially from thriving cinema cultures. From Mexico, we received an injection of new blood thanks to Guillermo Del Toro, Alfonso Cauron, and Alejandro González Iñárritu. Back in the nineties, it was the Hong Kong action stars on both sides of the camera, from Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-fat to John Woo and Corey Yuen.

For the past few years, South Korea has been leading the Asian wave of hit action movies, horror films, and thrillers and Hollywood has once again taken notice. 2013 marks the respective American debuts of three top South Korean directors: Kim Jee-woon (The Good, the Bad, the Weird, I Saw the Devil), who made the Arnold Schwarzenegger come-back film The Last Stand (released earlier this year on disc and reviewed here); Bong Joon-ho (The Host), whose end-of-the-world thriller Snowpiercer is due for release later this year; and Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Thirst), director of Stoker, a film that doesn’t fit within the usual genre parameters.

I like to think of Stoker as a vampire movie without a vampire. At least not in the mythic sense of the term. Mia Wasikowska is dreamy and uneasy as India Stoker, a teenage girl who is preternaturally attuned to the world and disconnected from the kids around her. Matthew Goode is creepily calm and seductive as the uncle she never even knew existed until he arrives for a funeral and stays on in the family manor (he is her Uncle Charlie, in fact, an offhanded reference to Hitchcock’s take on another dark uncle-niece relationship). Nicole Kidman is dizzy and disconnected as her weak and ineffectual mother. She seems to want to be there for her daughter, but she hardly seems present in the world at all.

Park sculpts the film, directed from an original script by Wentworth Miller, beautifully. We see the world through the heightened senses of India as she works through the loss of her father while attempting to measure this smiling, hypnotic uncle who has drifted into her life. He presents himself as her dark guardian angel, attempting to seduce India with his confidence, his power, and his violence (he seduction of the mother is more literal), but she has a more savvy understanding of the depths of his darkness.

Continue reading at Videodrone

[Originally published in Movietone News 47, January 1976]

Hands-down winner of the Wrongest Possible Project from the Very Beginning Award for 1975 is Conduct Unbecoming, a dreadful adaptation of a perhaps worse play, and a movie so misconceived—by the infallibly inept Michael Anderson—that its very attempts to juice itself with artificial life manage to exacerbate its turgidity. The cast list is imposing but the players, while too professional a lot to come right out and guy the piece, can’t manage to salvage it either. (What the hell, pick up the bucks via a few day contracts and hop a plane to something better: Christopher Plummer’s turn as Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King is discreetly fine enough to erase the memory of half a career’s worth of vainglorious posturing in junk like this.)

Read more »

‘A Colt Is My Passport’ (Koruto wa ore no pasupoto, 1967)

As Jasper Sharp acknowledges, western knowledge of Japanese films is so auteur-driven that his recounting the story of Nikkatsu Studio is practically an alternate history, wherein a once-defunct brand roared back in the ‘50s and ‘60s on the back of gangster films, an insurgent, disaffected youth movement, and a string of pop stars. Till Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill took all of that so far he was fired by the studio he’d helped grow, and the writing was on the wall.

The new issue of The Cine-Files investigates mise-en-scène. As is typical for the journal, the articles from regular contributors are quite fine (K. Brenna Wardell on the subversive “dining room” scene from The Phantom of Liberty; Jae Matthews on images of the titular prop in The Wolf Knife; Calvin Johnson’s thoughts on what the term can mean now in the age of digital, CGI cinema), but it’s the denser pieces from invited guests you really want to read. Thus V. F. Perkins on the marital miscommunication signaled by a bow tie in Stella Dallas and the aspirational hints of a chandelier in Johnny Guitar; Christian Keathley on Advice & Consent’s shot of the Vice President in the backseat of a car; and Adrian Martin unpacking the character traits displayed in a brief scene of awkward solace from Breaking Bad. Passed along by Kristin Thompson (herself interviewed in the issue), who on her own blog demonstrates the benefits of close analysis of mise-en-scène by posting 13 frame grabs from Late Spring, a dozen featuring a sewing machine, one, heart-breakingly, without.

Wandering through Cinémathèque Française’s exhibit dedicated to Jacques Demy has Tom Paulus thinking of Demy’s editing, the directors who influenced it (Bresson), the ones who didn’t (Pudovkin), and the ones who’ve inherited the style (Soderbergh). Via David Hudson.

Godard on the set in Nyon in March

In another instance Hudson performs double duty as translator, relaying the highlights from Daniel Ludwig’s piece for a Swiss newspaper on shooting a scene for Godard’s latest, Goodbye to Language.

“His works, then, are stripped bare almost to the point of abstraction—but it is as if they are made of concrete. The essential. The truth of the dialogue, the truth of the situations, the truth of the subjects, of the milieux, of the characters:  a dramaturgy derived from an agglomeration of facts, words, noises, movements, situations, as a motor is assembled.” David Davidson presents a marvelous tribute to Howard Hawks written by Henri Langois on the occasion of viewing some of his early silents, and finding in them “the modern man—that’s Hawks, completely.”

Which brings us to…. Nick Pinkerton’s takedown of Vulgar Auteurism has some bits that regretfully muddy the waters he’s hoping to clean but he’s pretty definitive on just how redundant, and therefore unnecessary, the whole damned thing is.

“The richness of his interests is amazing: ecstatically devout pilgrims; prehistoric cave paintings; fast-talking American auctioneers; ski-jumpers; TV evangelists; Siberian trappers; the blind, deaf and dumb. He has made more than 60 films, both fiction and documentaries, and, in total, they look like the life’s work of several directors, yet all maintain the spirit of one man’s view of this disparate planet.” My apologies for having missed Michael Newton’s quite lovely tribute to Herzog’s 50 years of remarkable filmmaking when it was published a few weeks back. If you haven’t already caught up with it, here, go.

““I couldn’t place my home if I were heartsick for it.” Imogen Smith wraps up her excellent series of articles on Robert Mitchum with a portrait of his wandering soul, both off- and on-screen. Also at The Chiseler, David Cairns praises the ambition and impeccable taste of Clarence Muse, forever rising despite the stereotyped black roles he was saddle with.

Sheila O’Malley salutes the underplayed mix of melancholy and wistfulness that marks Owen Wilson, “he with the tow-colored mop of hair, the crooked nose, and the smile that seems to need so much in return.”

Isabelle Adjani’s feminist stylings

Looking back to 1976, Michael Koresky considers three instances where nightmare visions have been unable to drain the oddness out of some aggressive period signifiers, leaving these “obsessively orchestrated film[s] with a lovable sore thumb”:  William Katt’s hair, Isabelle Adjani’s feminist stylings, and the baby face of Andy Kaufman.

A question often asked abstractly is made real in a moving article by film critic Mark Schilling, who endured a brutal assault on the streets and now finds himself in no mood to sit through movie violence.

Jacqueline Ronson tells the story of the Great Dawson Film Find of 1978, when the excavation of an Ottawa ice rink revealed a trove of silent movies that had reached their last stop on the exhibition circuit, and were dumped away as landfill. Via Luke McKernan.

Aggressively restoring the fight for the American Way that Bryan Singer somewhat notoriously elided, Man of Steel contains a record-breaking 100 product placements, thus raking in $160 million before ticket one was sold.

To illustrate the unexpected compromises that might be coming our way as more businesses rely on mathematical formulas to smoothly predict what had seemed charmingly erratic, unpredictable human behavior, Tom Whipple considers the results of Nick Meaney’s analysis of movie star earnings. Via Movie City News.

‘Ladykillers’ – West German style

Cinematographer Shane Hurlburt has been posting some D.P. advice on his blog. Though his two posts to date on the subject—on selecting lenses for a particular mood, and about some of the focal length choices he made on Mr. 3000—are aimed at professionals, both are interesting walkthroughs for laymen. Via John Wyver.

“In the past we would say that we want to make a movie in order to say something. If you tell investors that now then they’ll kill you. ‘What we want to do is make money. How can you say there is something you want to express in your films?’” Whether it’s sincere or a habit bred of decades spent staying on the good side of censors, Chen Kaige manages to declare all the old filmmaking ideals dead and buried while simultaneously putting an optimistic face on the current situation, in this interview with Allan Tong.

“I’m embarrassed to tell you this story, but I’ll tell it anyway. Gene Kelly called me and asked if I needed any help. I said, ‘No, I’m fine, Gene, thanks.’” Peter Bogdanovich talks to RogerEbert.com’s Donald Liebenson about the making of At Long Last Love and his delight at the newly restored edition. Since you asked, why yes, he does bring up Orson Welles; but it’s a perceptive quote from Cary Grant that’s the keeper.

Brandon Schaefer rounds up some of his favorite West German movie posters from the post-war period; that’s a wide swath, no question, and it’s a widely divergent collection in every aspect save quality.

Elías Querejeta

Obituary

Spanish producer Elías Querejeta was responsible for some of the most important Spanish films of the sixties and seventies, including 13 films by Carlos Saura (beginning with La Caza) and two by Victor Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive and El Sur). He passed away in Madrid at the age of 78. John Hopewell at Variety.

Actor Harry Lewis was a contract player at Warner Bros. in the 1940s and appeared in dozens of films and TV shows, including supporting roles in Key Largo (1948) and Gun Crazy (1950), but he made his fame as a restaurateur with Hamburger Hamlet, the gourmet burger chain he launched in 1950 with his partner and (later) wife Marilyn Friedman. More from Rene Lynch at the Los Angeles Times.

Seattle Screens

Visit the film review pages at The Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, and The Stranger for more releases.

View complete screening schedules through IMDb, MSN, Yahoo, or Fandango, pick the interface of your choice.

The weekly links page is compiled and curated by Bruce Reid, with obituaries and Seattle Screens curated by Sean Axmaker, and other contributions from friends of Parallax View.

Brit Marling’s agent falls under the spell of Alexander Skarsgård’s guerrilla leader

It’s almost too tempting to compare Greta Gerwig and Brit Marling, indie-bred actresses who also occasionally write their own movies. Both are smart, pretty, and rising fast. But where Gerwig, the star of Frances Ha, can tap a loosey-goosey and expertly comic side, Marling is serious enough to be unnerving. And thus far, this eerily focused actress has chosen exceptionally somber material. She co-wrote and starred in Another Earth and Sound of My Voice. Those films are unusual numbers, thoughtful and ambitious if not completely realized, and Marling’s enigmatic performances are part of their effect.

Marling teams once more with Sound of My Voice director Zal Batmanglij for The East, another intense piece that operates on a bigger scale. (“Bigger scale” must be contractually guaranteed when you add Ridley and Tony Scott as producers.) Things are quite grim again. Hired by a private intelligence agency to infiltrate an eco-terrorist group called The East, Sarah (Marling) rolls into the unwashed ranks of these self-styled environmental avengers.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

Tina (Alice Lowe) treats dogs better than humans

A geeky devotion to roadside attractions might directly correspond to an impulse to murder—or so it is suggested in Sightseers, a British black comedy with a gory backbeat. Come for the Tramway Village in Crich or the Pencil Museum in Keswick, stay for the head-bashing. The tourists are Chris (Steve Oram) and Tina (Alice Lowe), who’ve been dating a few weeks. Chris is the roadside enthusiast, a big red-bearded lunk who likes to drive his caravan to remote areas of the Midlands. To take their first road trip together, Alice must part from her nasty mother, a cranky lady who still blames her daughter for the accidental death of the family dog.

Death, accidental and otherwise, will follow the happy couple as they travel. Though apparently amiable, Chris has some very strict ideas about acceptable behavior—he is English, after all. Rudeness, littering, or acting above one’s station will set him off in ways that rapidly become homicidal. Tina is herself not entirely balanced. In fact, the two appear meant for each other; one of the film’s most amusing strokes is the suggestion that despite their antisocial tendencies, these two lunatics might actually be in love.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

Alex Gibney is the documentary filmmaker whose politically charged exposés include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side. It makes sense that he would clamber onto the spicy tale of Julian Assange, the white-haired super-hacker whose WikiLeaks enterprise has brought down the wrath of governments and corporations. Gibney should be a good match with the subject. But We Steal Secrets, while containing no shortage of fascinating material, is less than satisfying.

Gibney begins with background on Assange and WikiLeaks, building to the 2010 disclosure of a video of the U.S. military killing people revealed to be non-combatants in Baghdad. That was followed by the cascade of classified documents leaked by Assange and simultaneously published in The New York Times.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

What is society but a mutual agreement that we live under a certain collection of laws and the unspoken understanding that we will behave toward one another with a certain respect? That doesn’t stop folks from breaking the law, but it keeps the rest of us from following suit.

So what happens when all rules are suspended? Are we, by our nature, kind and benevolent and able to hold things together despite a social contract, or do we plunge into an every-man-for-himself attitude, preying upon others to survive? The Purge takes our fears of runaway crime into a realm where the social contract is suspended and we’re left to fend for ourselves in the face of the worst elements of the human race.

The movies have been performing this kind of social experiment for decades, especially in the shadow of the atomic bomb, but most end-of-the-world films jumped directly to the aftermath of scorched earth and dwindling survivors, as if visualizing society descended into chaos might actually trigger the real thing. It took the chill of the Cold War and the heat of civil unrest and political protest for studios to breach that taboo. Now the fear seems all too contemporary.

‘Lord of the Flies’

Here are some of the most interesting cinematic propositions for life in the face of social breakdown, where there are no more rules and survival of the fittest becomes a social competition. The one thing that binds all these films, and gives us reassurance as the end credits roll, is that we get to walk out of the dark and back into the light of society. At least until one of these comes true.

“Lord of the Flies” (1963)

The cause: British schoolboys shipwrecked without adult supervision.

The culture: Schoolyard rules as a way of life.

The original 1963 screen version of William Golding’s novel, long a standard assignment for high school English students, offers a clear-eyed vision of English schoolboys stranded on a desert island without adult supervision who sink into tribalism, savagery and, finally, murder. Filmmaker Peter Brooks brings the point home with his casting and unadorned direction: These are modern-day Lost Boys whose adolescent sense of play, flaring emotions and one-upmanship spin out of control when left to their own instincts. Watching these cute kids descend into violence as if playing a real-life game of cowboys and Indians is all the more disturbing by the sheer charge they get out of it.

Lessons learned: Don’t turn your back on a pack of schoolboys.

Reasons for optimism: Once the adults return, these kids are really, really sorry that things got out of hand.

Continue reading at MSN’s Parallel Universe

The thirty ninth annual Seattle International Film Festival came to a close on Sunday, June 9, day twenty five of the marathon event, with the closing night film The Bling Ring, fresh from its debut at Cannes. Its two young stars, Katie Chang and Israel Broussard, were on hand to introduce the film and send the festival off to its gala closing night party.

Sofia Coppola has done marvelous work in ethereal studies of disconnection and emotional confusion, of people lost in their worlds or blinded by celebrity and affluence.

Sofia Coppola’s ‘The Bling Ring’ closes SIFF, fresh out of Cannes.

The Bling Ring fits in very nicely thematically to her growing body of work, but these kids don’t actually yearn for anything beyond fashion accessories and the thrill of robbing the rich and famous and lack any capacity for self-reflection. The dispassionate observation, intercut with social media alerts and pop culture snaps and stories, makes them a reflection of that world without offering us a character underneath worth caring about, or at least fascinated with enough to follow through.

Like Toronto’s, SIFF’s top awards—the Golden Space Needles, this year designed by local artist and sculptor Piper O’Neill—are voted on by the audiences. This year, with plenty of high-profile American indies and international imports on display, the surprise Best Picture winner was the warm-hearted Fanie Fourie’s Lobola, a South African romantic comedy that explores racial and social tensions through laughs (I sadly missed this one; the final show conflicted with my own rare appearance on a festival panel). Director Henk Pretorius, accepting the award via phone, said he would change the title because nobody gets it right. First runner: The Rocket, an uplifting Australian drama shot in Laos.

Continue reading at Keyframe

So many collaborative projects on the internet come out piecemeal, dribbled out over several weeks and spread across half-a-dozen websites. None of that for Gina Telaroli and David Phelps, who have followed up their previous Dossier on Wellman with an equally exhaustive one dedicated to Allan Dwan, and present it to you in one glorious package. Free for download right now, 46 articles, with only five reprints, from writers such as Ted Fendt, Fernando F. Croce, R. Emmet Sweeney, Cullen Gallagher, and Farran Smith Nehme, exploring one of the finest and longest careers in Hollywood. Currently the articles are all in their writer’s original languages; English and (courtesy of project host LUMIÈRE) Spanish language editions are forthcoming.

But even with that bounty you can never get enough Dwan. Richard Brody has some good thoughts on how the density of the director’s social and psychological observations give his outbursts of violence a “strange, removed side.”

Speaking of great westerns, one of the genre’s best but relatively unheralded director/actor pairings gets some attention, as Nick Pinkerton salutes three marvelous films made by that two-man band of outsiders, Robert Aldrich and Burt Lancaster.

The early films of Ford and Harry Carey, on the other hand, are hardly masterpieces, but unmistakably show signs of a master in the making, argues Bristol Silents’s Rosie Taylor.

“His Oscar acceptance speech began: ‘If you ever wondered what reflected glory looks like, this is it!’ And it went on to remind the Academy of Hollywood’s wretched record, destroying 73% of pre-sound films: ‘By God, your predecessors did a terrible job of preserving the silent era!’” The Guardian’s Philip Home offers an introduction to Kevin Brownlow’s body of work.

Read more »

Sarah Polley with her father Michael during the ’70s

The phrase “spoiler alert” gains new currency in the realm of narrative documentary. The reveals and gotchas contained within them are probably already public record—but still, one hesitates to blow the incredible surprises of, say, Searching for Sugar Man for unsuspecting viewers. In the case of Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, we should be able to dance around the spoilers. And yet, because the actress/director wants not merely to tell a tale of her family’s life, but also to question the reliability of storytelling itself, we might wonder why old-fashioned issues such as suspense and surprise should be part of the program in the first place.

But Stories We Tell is suspenseful and surprising, even if the filmmaker might want to disown those qualities. Polley was a child star in her native Canada, won raves for her youthful roles in The Sweet Hereafter and Go, and snagged an Oscar nomination for writing Away From Her (2006), a much-liked film she also directed.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

Erin Moriarty plays Kelly, Joe’s dream girl

Maybe it’s a lingering childhood memory of the classic book My Side of the Mountain, or a weakness for a certain kind of afternoon-daydream movie, but The Kings of Summer fell directly into my sweet spot. The movie doesn’t exist in a real world (please don’t waste energy trying to reconcile psychological motives or social logistics), but in the enchanted realm of a teenage summer. Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts understands this charmed mood, which is why he layers the film with dewy inserts that would not be out of place in a Terrence Malick picture. The result is a nicely bittersweet ode to killing time and patching up differences.

We must begin by buying into screenwriter Chris Galetta’s implausible premise: Three high-school lads build a ramshackle house of their own in a clearing in some woods outside their suburban Ohio hometown. Joe (Seattle native Nick Robinson) has had it with his ill-equipped father (Nick Offerman); both are working through hostilities connected to the death of Joe’s mother. Joe’s friend Patrick (Gabriel Basso) is almost as disenchanted with his parents (Megan Mullally and Marc Evan Jackson), so he joins his bud for the adventure.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

Filmmaker Arch Oboler came to the movies from radio, where he made a reputation for his creative approach to radio drama with the iconic horror series Lights Out and other radio dramas. He approached filmmaking with the same commitment to finding imaginative ways to tell stories and express subjective experiences on the screen, even while working in the salt mines of the B-movie unit at MGM, where he made his directorial debut with Strange Holiday in 1945.

He adapted Bewitched (1945), his second film as a director, from his own radio play, “Alter Ego,” a drama about a young woman haunted by a voice in her head grows into an alternate and ultimately aggressive personality. Phyllis Thaxter, a young, fresh-faced ingénue newly contracted by MGM, stars as Joan Ellis, a bright, hopeful young bride from a good family with a history of “unease” that erupts in sudden assaults by the disembodied voice in her head. And they are assaults, spoken with a charge and a ferocity (not to mention a desire for “transgressive” pleasures) that overwhelms the meek good girl. The voice (by an uncredited Audrey Totter) becomes stronger and more aggressive and Joan makes a deal with the increasingly powerful personality: she will run away, leave her life behind for the excitement and possibilities of New York City, if the voice will leave her alone. It’s only a temporary reprieve.

Bewitched is a psychological thriller that delivers a murder, a dramatic courtroom trial, and a psychiatrist to provide exposition, but it is also an attempt at a serious approach to multiple personality disorder. This is long before such psychological concepts became more known through productions like The Three Faces of Eve (not to mention Hitchcock’s Psycho) and he presents therapy as less a process than a psychological exorcism, but if the terms and explanations are naïve, his commitment to the real case history that inspired his drama is genuine. Joan’s story is framed by the case notes of Dr. Bergson (Edmund Gwenn), a psychiatrist who recalls her case file while Joan sits in prison awaiting her fate: “In 59 minutes, the clock will stop for her.” Gwenn plays the voice of authority as a kindly, professorial doctor, gentle and understanding, pulling out a pipe to puff thoughtfully as he explains psychological concepts in layman terms.

Continue reading at Turner Classic Movies

“Every Democrat who has presidential ambitions is now going to beat a path straight for Jeffrey’s door. Or they’re too dumb to be president.” Reporting on the fund-raising monster that is Dreamworks’s Jeffrey Katzenberg, Mother Jones’s Andy Kroll dutifully reports the official line that Katzenberg doesn’t ask for any returns on his investment while also making perfectly clear how pliant the Obama administration has been to Hollywood’s concerns. Via Longform.

Then again, Katzenberg’s pleas for money from the next wave of Hollywood power players may fall on ears deaf to Democratic requests, should any of the animators studios have recruited from Brigham Young University rise through the ranks to moguldom. As Jon Mooallem reports, their work ethic and mature expectations have made quite the impression, and they’re already family-friendly by default.

Thomas Doherty’s new book, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, arguing that business interests and political intimidation combined to assure the American movie industry let Germany’s descent into horror proceed without comment, has received rave reviews thus far, including Dave Kehr in the NY Times and Christopher Bray in the WSJ. All well-deserved, based on the powerful excerpt available at Pop Matters detailing Carl Laemmle’s idealistic, internationalist hopes for Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and the brutal rejection it received in Berlin, a gleeful Goebbels leading brownshirts in chants against the “Judenfilm.”

“You don’t know whether you’re watching Robert Mitchum thinking, ‘Here I am making another crummy movie’ or watching his character thinking, ‘Here I am living this crummy life, and nothing makes any sense, but I don’t even care.’” Part two of Imogen Smith’s profile of Robert Mitchum has arrived, with particular focus on his RKO contract years.

Read more »