Tag Archives: cinema
Medium Cool at 45
“Beyond the age of innocence…into the age of awareness,” read the caption at the top of Medium Cool‘s stylized poster when the film was released 45 years ago in 1969. The line is telling in that it speaks to the real-life events at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago that are captured in the film. [...]
Happy Birthday Magical Mystery Tour
This year we celebrate the 45th birthday of the U.S. release of The Beatles’ psychedelic, experimental film, Magical Mystery Tour. The band’s third movie, Tour was released in theaters in America, but it was actually a made-for-television project when it debuted on sets across Britain on Boxing Day, December 26, 1967. The best Beatles flicks [...]
AB: After Brando
Marlon Brando may have been the best American actor ever. He was a star of the stage before becoming a cinema idol, bridging a career between the two with his performance as Stanley Kowalski in both the Broadway production and the Warner Brothers film of A Streetcar Named Desire — both directed by Elia Kazan. [...]
The Horror of Roman Polanski
One of my favorite movie-going experiences of 2012 was spending four Saturday and Sunday afternoons watching Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film: A 15-hour history of cinema that A.O. Scott of The New York Times called “a semester-long film studies survey course compressed into 15 brisk, sometimes contentious hours…stands as an invigorated compendium of conventional wisdom.” Before [...]
Pasolini: The Rebel
The film Salò is set in Fascist-occupied Italy in 1944. It tells the story of what happens when a Duke, a Bishop, a Magistrate and a President take 18 adolescent boys and girls captive and travel to a remote palace. What follows is one of the most extreme sociopolitical criticisms ever committed to film. Based [...]
