Smart Words About Cinema
Action Packed Double Feature: Fighting Mad/Moving Violation (Shout! Factory) Jonathan Demme wrote and directed Fighting Mad (1976), his third feature, for producer Roger Corman but it was actually produced for 20th Century Fox, which makes the film his studio debut. It’s not his best film by far but this mix of vigilante/revenge movie and eco-conscious [...]
Big Bad Mama / Big Bad Mama II Double Feature (Shout! Factory) Crazy Mama / The Lady In Red Double Feature (Shout! Factory) One of the less recognized genres that director/producer/indie-exploitation movie mogul Roger Corman adopted as a minor specialty was the depression-era gangster movie. As a director he turned out Machine Gun Kelly (1958), [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 64-65, March 1980] I’ve never had the opportunity to see Allan Arkush and Joe Dante’s Hollywood Boulevard; on the other hand, I suspect that I saw a fair portion of it in Roger Corman: Hollywood’s Wild Angel, Christian Blackwood’s genial film dossier on Roger Corman, whose New World Pictures released [...]
Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married may look like your basic Sundance/Slamdance indie feature, with its wandering handheld camerawork and ensemble riffing through the collisions and confrontations of a dysfunctional family reunion, but in his hands the familiar conflicts and clashes are invigorated by an authenticity and, dare I say it, a sense of rediscovery. The [...]