Blog Archives
Monster Man: Rick Baker
While Rick Baker is probably best known for the staggering, Academy Award-winning transformation sequence he orchestrated for the classic An American Werewolf in London, he most recently had another howling success when he took home the Oscar for his make-up in the remake of The Wolfman. He’s won Hollywood’s highest award for Best Makeup [...]
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 [...]
THEY LIVE at 25
John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) doesn’t sound like a classic movie: A drifter wanders into Nowheresville USA — a Los Angeles neighborhood devastated by an economic recession. After witnessing some suspicious activity surrounding a strange church, the man discovers a box of special sunglasses which reveal that the reality he’s come to take for granted [...]
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 [...]
Peter Watkins’ Unreal Realities
British filmmaker Peter Watkins is a docudrama pioneer who has combined documentary and dramatic cinematic techniques to deconstruct historic events and cultural trends. A pacifist and a radical, Watkins’ best work examines media in general and film in particular to ask questions about the relationships between media and audiences. A powerful and provocative filmmaker, Watkins’ [...]
Avenging Images: Steve Schapiro’s Taxi Driver
Of all the brilliant gems of 1970′s America’s New Hollywood Cinema, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver may be the grimiest and goriest. Beyond Paul Schrader’s loneliness-crazed script or Scorsese’s street-level shooting, it’s Robert DeNiro’s portrait of the mohawked, gun-wielding avenger Travis Bickle that continues to make this film crackle with energy and danger decades later. Steve [...]
Werner Herzog on The South Bank Show
Following up on my last post, here is a great link for those of you who’d like to know more about Werner Herzog, his films and ideas. The South Bank Show was a UK arts television series that aired from 1978 through 2010. This episode aired in 1982 and features a young, dark haired Werner [...]
Don’t Text Werner Herzog
The latest documentary by the great German filmmaker Werner Herzog doesn’t examine the life of some extraordinary outsider or recast found-footage into an idiosyncratic, philosophical narrative. What’s most surprising about this latest project is that it’s essentially a PSA, but, of course, one executed with the poetry and illumination we’ve come to expect from the [...]
Farewell,Vixen
The Quebec-born actress, Haji, passed away over the weekend on Friday, August 10. The iconic star of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was 67. Barberella (seriously!) Catton became an exotic dancer at the age of 14. Cult film genius Russ Meyer discovered her working in a topless bar. The duo made five films together, but their [...]
Karen Black: Don’t Look Back
So odd to look at the Wiki entry about actress Karen Black and find it reading in the past tense. Although Black isn’t necessarily a household name today, among lovers of both high and low cinema, and bohemian types with a high pop culture IQ, Black was iconic. A native Chicagoan, Black was a bright [...]
