biography Archives - Parallax View

Bernardo Bertolucci, biography, by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, Directors, Essays

Bernardo Bertolucci

Written by Sean Axmaker November 26, 2018

[originally published in a booklet for the DVD release of Partner by NoShame in 2005]

The political and the sensual meet in the cinema of Bernardo Bertolucci. His visually dense and stylistically labyrinthine films are among the most beautiful — and the most provocative (The Last Tango in Paris) — ever made.His career straddles canvases both epic (1900,The Last Emperor) and intimate (Luna, Besieged), from defiantly Italian stories that reverberate with the echoes of Italy’s Fascist past to international dramas that explore culture,history, and spirituality around the world. All of them are beautifully crafted works attuned the texture of experience and the magic of the moment.

Review: Gods and Monsters

Written by Sean Axmaker October 29, 2018

[Originally written for Seattle Weekly, November 1998]

Set the wayback machine to 1998. Parallax View presents reviews of films released 20 years ago, written by our contributors for various papers and websites. Most of these have not been available for years.

In Bill Condon’s God and Monsters the ghost of Frankenstein’s monster haunts James Whale (Ian McKellan) even in retirement. Whale, the debonair, openly gay British director who came to Hollywood from the London stage to make “art” and had his greatest success with a string of “monster movies,” maintained a love-hate relationship with Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein almost all his life. Condon weaves the lumbering image of the misunderstood monster into the fabric of the film like a haunting memory that won’t go away.

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Actors, biography, by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors

Myrna Loy: Hollywood Loyalty

Written by Richard T. Jameson December 11, 2016

Myrna Loy is Turner Classic Movies’ Star of the Month for December. Here’s a bio written two decades ago. It’s all still true. – RTJ

Myrna Loy
Born as Myrna Williams, August 2, 1905; Raidersburg (near Helena), Montana
Death: December 14, 1993; New York, New York

Myrna Loy was a Montana girl who broke out of the Grauman’s chorus line to play vamps and houris in the 1920s and early ’30s, then became the paragon of sophisticated—though always respectable—womanhood on the American screen.