Blog Archives
Jim Morrison’s HWY
45 years ago, in the summer of 1969, Jim Morrison shot his experimental film HWY in Los Angeles and in the Mojave Desert. Morrison had hitchhiked hundreds of miles in his younger days as a college student and the thumbs-up locomotion of the protagonist (played by Morrison) at the center of HWY finds the director/actor [...]
Paul Thomas Anderson VS Thomas Pynchon
This week Paul Thomas Anderson — the greatest American director of his generation? — announced his latest project since The Master. Here’s the early word from Cinema Blend… When you think of Paul Thomas Anderson and the compact but rich filmography he possesses, words like “intense,” “poetic,” and even “tragic” all seem to do the [...]
Stanley Kubrick on the Moon
Yesterday we marked the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and today we’re reminded of the first human footprints on the lunar surface. What may have been a “small step for man” may have been an epic studio production for cinematic sorcerer Stanley Kubrick. According to researcher Jay Weidner, we actually landed on the [...]
Coven!
In 1999, the documentary film American Movie captured the day-to-day struggles of Milwaukee based independent filmmaker Mark Borchardt. At the beginning of the film, Borchardt outlines a feature film he’s struggling to make. That film is called Northwestern, but Borchardt switches gears and decides to finish his short film ,Coven, in hopes that a successfully [...]
The Animated Tom Waits
Pioneering animated filmmaker Ralph Bakshi had already produced landmark films like Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic and The Lord of the Rings when he approached John Lamb at Lyon Lamb Animation Systems about building a rotoscope set-up that worked with video instead of film. Rotoscoping involves drawing and painting over images projected from live footage [...]
Mystery Train at 25
It’s hard to believe, but Jim Jarmusch’s film Mystery Train debuted at Cannes 25 years ago in the spring of 1989. The first of the director’s anthology films, Mystery is also the first film Jarmusch shot in color. The film features three separate but interconnected stories about foreigners who find themselves crossing paths at the [...]
Kill Bill Deconstructed
While “deconstruction” is the buzz word we always hear associated with all things postmodern — art, architecture, food — it often carries with it intellectual and analytical implications that aren’t necessarily a part of the application of the process of “deconstructing.” Sometimes, deconstructing a literary theme, or an architectural movement or a Thanksgiving dinner can [...]
Jodorowsky 1.0
Nashville, TN is experiencing a Alejandro Jodorowsky renaissance this month with the Belcourt Theatre’s screenings of some of the auteur’s most important works, leading up to the local premiere of his new film, Dance of Reality. My fellow local film writers and I all respect the master’s outlandish visuals, his passion for the surreal and [...]
Apocalypse Again: Coppola & Milius
Several posts back I mentioned that this year is the 45 anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s production house American Zoetrope. It also happens to be the 35th anniversary of the 1979 film Apocalypse Now which was written by Zoetrope man of letters, John Milius and directed — of course — by Coppola himself. Fellow Zoetroper [...]
The First Horror Flick
According to the Filmsite page, 1908 was a big year for the movies: the first film industry union was organized, D.W. Griffith began making movies, and A Visit to the Seaside, the first natural color film was released. It was a banner time for the still-new medium, and perhaps the most important milestone of the [...]
