Smart Words About Cinema
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 [...]
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 [...]
Leah Warshawski didn’t set out for a movie career. “I got into it because I worked on a boat in college,” recalls the co-director of Finding Hillywood, speaking by phone from a shoot in Idaho. She was studying Japanese at the University of Hawaii when the marine coordinator of the 2003 TV movie Baywatch: Hawaiian [...]
As the story goes, Ray Harryhausen was inspired to explore the possibilities of stop-motion animation after seeing King Kong with his best friend. That said friend was Ray Bradbury makes the story irresistible. That Harryhausen went on to apprentice under Willis O’Brien, the very man who sculpted and animated the king of the jungle and [...]
Physical perfection has been an ideal for as long as there has been civilization, celebrated in games and competitions, extolled in song and story, captured in paintings and, since the late 19th century, photographs and movies. That inspiration continues today. In Pain and Gain, Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson pump iron to sculpt themselves into [...]
He wore black denim trousers and motorcycle boots And a black leather jacket with an eagle on the back He had a hopped-up ‘cicle that took off like a gun That fool was the terror of highway 101 As The Place Beyond the Pines begins, Ryan Gosling ritually readies himself to ride his motorcycle in [...]
by Evan Morgan Richard Linklater’s cinema is made of moments. This is not to say that his films are valuable only in pieces, or that the parts are greater than the whole, but rather, that Linklater’s films find deepest insights through small gestures and hushed glances. For all of the hyper-articulate dialogue spouted by Linklater’s [...]
By Matthew Rovner [Note: The television production of Night of the Auk is not available on home video in any format. The UCLA film library kindly let me view a video cassette of the production. However, I was not allowed to take any photos; nonetheless, there are pre-existing photos of the TV production, on the [...]
by Evan Morgan Alfred Hitchcock’s career proper begins with a blonde girl’s dying scream and ends on a similarly coiffed woman’s knowing wink. These bookends aren’t indicative of some tonal change over the course of the master’s work; Hitchcock the tragedian and Hitchcock the jester have been here all along, harmoniously sharing the same stage [...]
by Evan Morgan In Notorious, love is a weapon more corrosive than a heaping pile of uranium ore. And it has a longer half-life. This Nazi spy story slowly reveals the bruised, battered, but still beating heart pumping beneath its surface. As it does, it emerges as the Hitchcock love story par excellence, a bewitched [...]
Some problems are bigger than others. Jack faces some pretty big ones in Jack the Giant Slayer. Giant problems, you might say, which dwarf mere human concerns both figuratively and literally. An update of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” this fantasy adventure follows a tradition that goes back to David and Goliath: the mortal man taking on the [...]
For an Oscar year in which several big awards were foregone conclusions, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences soiree this past Sunday included its share of surprises. It also featured an equable, perhaps accidental, distribution of the prizes among a range of movies. When we consider how set the Hollywood community appeared to [...]
[originally published on Straight Shooting] Best Pictures ‘Argo’ is better than The Broadway Melody, Cimarron, Cavalcade, The Great Ziegfeld, Gentleman’s Agreement, The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, The Sound of Music, The Sting, Rocky, Gandhi, Driving Miss Daisy, Braveheart, A Beautiful Mind, Chicago, Slumdog Millionaire Best Pictures ‘Argo’ can orbit [...]
God love Tom Shales and this Tweet last night: “For the first time ever the Oscar show is worse than the Red Carpet crap that preceded it.” For anyone who does not regularly rejoice in the work of the former Washington Post TV critic and Pulitzer Prize winner, he blogs here. For fear of suddenly [...]
Argo, the movie inspired by the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, is going to win the Academy Award as best picture of 2012. Go ahead, place that bet in your office Oscar pool, but don’t expect to reap much advantage, because everybody else is just as sure that Argo is going to win. The signs are [...]