Smart Words About Cinema
The morning started off grim: It was Sunday, and much too early, with heavy frost icing everything up, including my car. The theater was jam-packed with mommies and daddies and tykes, all of whom apparently lacked bladder control. Then the screen darkened, and a music video unreeled, starring prepubescent elf Justin Bieber, happily bopping around [...]
Despicable Me Dir: Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud Sincere Question: During this, Pixar’s Golden Age of Animation, is it somehow ungrateful to wish for an occasional decent deviation from Masterpiece after Masterpiece, in the way that Bugs Bunny and Co. served as a hellzapoppin’ corrective to Disney’s dignified heft? (Despite the repeated efforts of Dreamworks, the [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979] Establishing a mythology of creation and existence based upon the centrality of rabbits in the frame of things, Watership Down endows itself with a mythic sense that takes a familiar shape. It divides roughly into three parts: the first of these deals with the journey of a [...]
M Butterfly (Warner) Warner Home Video releases a quartet of DVD debuts, all with troubled critical histories: loved by some, disliked by many, largely ignored by most. And that’s what makes their arrivals so interesting: it gives us a chance, an excuse even, to revisit the films. That said, I’m up to my eyeballs in [...]
Pre-Code Hollywood Collection / Cleopatra: 75th Anniversary Edition Universal Home Video plunges into the sex, sin and bathtub gin of pre-code Hollywood films with their answer to the “Forbidden Hollywood” series from Warner. The Pre-Code Hollywood Collection is branded as part of the “Universal Backlot Series” but it actually collects six films Paramount Pictures (Universal [...]