There's a little back-and-forth between me and Glenn Kenny about this Oscar-nominated picture called "Avatar" over at MSN Movies. Good heavens, I wonder, what's all this fuss about? Maybe you're just a fogey, Glenn suggests. I say I wanted to…
Yasujiro Ozu and Kogo Noda understood how to do it. They wrote many screenplays together, including those for some of the greatest films ever made, from "Late Spring" (1949) to "Tokyo Story" (1953) to "An Autumn Afternoon" (1962). Baths are…
Following up on this post. Click to enlarge. (Thanks to Richard T. Jameson)
Look up at this commercial. Look down at the interview about how they made it. Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice and not a lady. And if you're really going to put that message across, you…
I enjoyed Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island" as a kind of retro-Universal Pictures "old dark house" horror movie re-imagined by Hitchcock in the 1950s Technicolor textures of "Dial M for Murder," "Rear Window" and "Vertigo." As Scorsese himself described a similar…
Those who think this is funny (as I do) and those who think it is not funny probably do so for the very same reasons. Your take?
A great, cut-through-the-crap piece by NYU journalism associate professor Jay Rosen at PressThink asks why reality has been declared off-limits in American political journalism. Rosen zeroes in on one key line in David Barstow's fair and balanced New York Times…
I just want to say: Wow! Here are frame grabs from three shots in Kenji Mizoguchi's 1936 "Osaka Elegy" ("Naniwa erejî") that strikingly illustrate what in-depth staging and deep focus are all about. In the first one, we see Ayako…
That's not my headline up there. It's from an unsigned entry at Huffington Post, where you'll find a clip from this recent "Family Guy" episode ("Extra-Large Medium"). I don't watch the show, so I may not understand the context of…
Chicago music critics and "Sound Opinions" radio co-hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot are hosting an evening devoted to their "best rock movies of all time" Friday at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee. They're not saying yet what those will…
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