Smart Words About Cinema
R. Emmet Sweeney’s profile of William Witney goes beyond just signing on to Tarantino’s endorsement. He paints the picture of a young man lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time—when your coworkers could include Yakima Canutt, and a friendly visit to Busby Berkeley’s set could show you a whole new [...]
There are several flippant ways to respond to Quentin Tarantino’s remarks about John Ford’s purported racism, from gruff dismissal to just tossing out Sergeant Rutledge and calling it a day. Kent Jones offers the thoughtful response, and it’s definitive. Also at Film Comment, subversion of a less haunted, more joyously playful sort, in Maitland McDonagh’s [...]
“That’s why I’m spending so much time talking to you about the business and the money, because this is the force that is pushing cinema out of mainstream movies. I’ve been in meetings where I can feel it slipping away, where I can feel that the ideas I’m tossing out, they’re too scary or too [...]
Some marvelous audio finds from Cinephilia and Beyond. First, courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Alfred Hitchcock and Ernest Lehman work out the bishop’s kidnapping from Family Plot, the screenwriter cautious to fit the scene in to the movie as a whole, the director with the cathedral already [...]
Seattle screenings and cinema events are surveyed at Parallax View here. You’ve certainly decided by now whether you find Terrence Malick’s filmmaking methods daring and exploratory or alarmingly shambolic. Bilge Ebiri’s account of the production of To the Wonder won’t change anybody’s mind on the subject, but it offers more evidence of a director who [...]
DGA Quarterly presents a collection of on-set photos of Howard Hawks, the master showing John Wayne how to throw a punch, Charles Coburn how to flirt, and Angie Dickinson…no, well, he’s just taking in Dickinson like the rest of us. (Click through for downloadable .pdf.) Also in the new issue, interviews with Robert Zemeckis on [...]
Seattle screenings and cinema events are surveyed at Parallax View here. Video: Last Monday, for the first time in its 42-year history, the National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture was given by a filmmaker. No prize for guessing Martin Scorsese. His presentation, a stirring call for visual language to be understood as vital and [...]
Seattle screenings and cinema events for the week are surveyed at Parallax View here. David Bordwell’s been thinking about the many purposes of murder in 1940s suspense; which means, despite delaying the reveal behind an impressive collection of literary and cinematic antecedents, he’s been thinking about Hitchcock. Complete with an introduction cast in genially autobiographical [...]
The new Senses of Cinema has arrived. Among the highlights are Michael Pattison on the Surrealist bona fides of Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, and Tom Ryan (in what’s billed the first of a series) looking at Sirk’s employment of and struggles with genre in three of his “lesser” films: Taza, Son of Cochise, [...]
Seattle screenings and cinema events are surveyed at Parallax View here. “How gauche! Stop that fighting this minute! You want to wake up the audience?!?” If you recognized that as a line from Borey Lyndon, Grady Hendrix’s tribute to Mad Magazine’s movie parodies should prove right up your alley. Supplemented by interviews with editor-in-chief John [...]
Nick Pinkerton, driving through the Midwest, thinks upon the region’s cinematic apotheoses; specifically, two Minnelli masterpieces and The Magnificent Ambersons. Speaking of Pinkerton’s “pride of Kenosha, Wisconsin,” Joanne Hill Tarbox Styles, daughter of the headmaster at the Todd School for Boys, which Welles attended during his teens, offers a memoir of those years that reminds [...]
The New Republic’s Jason Farago worries that Amour might not just chronicle a death but embody one, if it turns out to be the last, grand gasp of a European cinema whose state subsidies are drying up. Charles Barr takes the current resurgence in all things Hitchcock as opportunity to argue that the greatest of [...]
Seattle screenings and cinema events are surveyed at Parallax View here. Spotlight this week is on Noir City 2013. Even if Oscar predictions and politicking hold as little interest for you as for me, you can still relish the ballot provided by an anonymous director to the Hollywood Reporter. Not least for the way his [...]
In the new Bright Lights Film Journal, Imogen Sara Smith offers a marvelous analysis of how Powell and Pressburger use narrative ellipses (and Roger Livesey) to very different ends in two different movies. Other highlights include Oren Shai’s tracking the changes of the Women in Prison genre, from silent-era message movies still experimenting with the [...]
“Cuz the slave is a Negro in your cinema/In your cinema/In your cinema/Jamie Foxx plays this Negro in your cinema/He even blows White chicks away.” All due respect to Groundhog Day, February’s gladdest tiding for movie lovers is the annual return of Odienator’s Black History Mumf, with sharp, observant, and very funny pieces already published on [...]