Smart Words About Cinema
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] Sam Fuller: “You can always tell about a leaper by the distance his toes are from the edge of either the window or the ledge of the roof he’s threatening to jump from. If you’re covering it, watch those toes. If they stick out, he’s not a [...]
Ron Ely seem to be enjoying his retirement. Most famous for playing Tarzan in the first TV incarnation of the story, he also played another great pulp hero, Doc Savage, in a 1975 movie, starred in a short-lived revival of the TV series “Sea Hunt” and even took over hosting duties for The Miss American [...]
Chinatown is an American masterpiece, a great film released in a year full of great films. It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, but in the face of “The Godfather Part II” (among others), it won only a single Oscar: Best Original Screenplay by Robert Towne. It is a magnificent original script, a great American novel [...]
Before he embarked on his impressive but unfinished adaptation of “Lord of the Rings,” maverick American animator Ralph Bakshi created Wizards (Fox), a futuristic fantasy set in the aftermath of the apocalypse. A mix of Tolkein-esque quest epic and seventies attitude, it was like a PG version of an underground comic book made for the big [...]
On Saturday, February 11, Douglas Trumbull will receive the Gordon E. Sawyer Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his contributions to the technology of the industry. Trumbull has over a dozen patents in his name, and developed or improved upon many of the filmmaking techniques that are standard in today’s [...]
Marrow screens at Northwest Film Forum for two nights, on Tuesday, January 24 and Wednesday, January 25. See the NWFF website for showtimes and ticket information. I’ve known filmmakers Matt Wilkins and Eliza Fox for almost eight years. I met them when their first film, Buffalo Bill’s Defunct, had its local premiere at SIFF in [...]
Marrow, the second feature from Seattle filmmaker Matt Wilkins, screens at Northwest Film Forum for two nights, on Tuesday, January 24 and Wednesday, January 25, with director Wilkins in attendance. I wrote a profile of Wilkins and his film for the film’s local debut at SIFF 2011. I reprint the feature, originally published in Seattle [...]
Back in 2007, in conjunction with the release of Inland Empire, I had the opportunity to interview David Lynch twice in the same year. This is the second of the two interviews, conducted over the phone and focused on the DVD release of Inland Empire, which he produced and distributed independently through his company Absurda. [...]
[originally published on Greencine, August 2007] David Lynch, the once boyish maverick of such dark, demanding, and confounding films as Blue Velvet and Lost Highway (not to mention the gentle, G-rated slice of slightly askew Americana, The Straight Story), is 60 now. You can see his age in has face and his graying hair (still [...]
Quentin Tarantino developed a reputation not simply for unconventional storytelling and inventive writing, but for inspired casting. Reservoir Dogs introduced Lawrence Tierney to a new generation of crime movie fans. Pulp Fiction revived the faltering career of John Travolta. And Jackie Brown, his first film based on someone else’s story, he cast as his leads [...]
Jackie Brown may not Quentin Tarantino’s best film, but it should be. With grown up, lived-in characters, Tarantino broke through the jacked-up, smart talking pulp adolescents that populate his (admittedly ingenious and inventive) reference-riddled earlier films to tell the stories of a pair of middle-aged survivors. For those key roles, Tarantino cast a couple of [...]
Road to Nowhere is Monte Hellman’s first feature in 21 years. The director of The Shooting and Two-Lane Blacktop, a resolutely personal director who turned out drive-in pictures for Roger Corman and spent his career largely transforming work-for-hire productions into distinctive and mysterious films, spent years taking jobs as editor and second-unit director while one [...]
by Kathleen Murphy and Richard T. Jameson [Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977] Howard Winchester Hawks was home the afternoon of July 12, 1976. For some time there, it looked as if it wouldn’t happen. Kathleen Murphy had finally taken the leap and declared Howard Hawks: An American Auteur in the Hemingway Tradition [...]
By Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy [Originally published in Movietone News 55, September 1977] Robert Altman visited Seattle late last year in connection with the world premiere of Welcome to L.A. at the Harvard Exit. The directorial debut of his sometime assistant director and—on Buffalo Bill and the Indians—co-screenwriter Alan Rudolph, Welcome also marked [...]
By E. Steven Fried One of the great pleasures of SIFF 2004 was the opportunity to see Thom Andersen’s 169- minute video essay, Los Angeles Plays Itself. Utilizing hundreds of unauthorized clips of obscure and well-known films [you will never see this on DVD] Andersen poses the question:why is the most filmed city in the [...]