Shooting Down Pictures (Free subscription) | 08/16/2008
screened Monday August 11 2008 at the Walter Reade Theater, New York NY as part of the Madame Kawakita retrospective TSPDT rank # IMDb Wiki Imagine a Japanese version of The Godfather where Michael, Sonny and Don Corleone were all trying to sleep with Talia Shire’s Connie, and you have an idea of how brilliantly perverse The [...]
GreenCine Daily (Free subscription) | 08/03/2008
"Veteran filmmaker Yôji Yamada closes his thematic trilogy about the last samurai and the end of traditional values with Love and Honor (2006), the most melodramatic of the three films," writes Simon Abrams in the New York Press. "While...
Variety.com (Free subscription) | 07/01/2008
Film Reviews: With a title to give even Douglas Sirk pause, the rousing, old-fashioned gay meller "Between Love and Goodybe" pits monogamous love against polymorphous perversity. Out of the resultant sturm und drag, tragedy is born.
Dispatches from Zembla (Free subscription) | 06/27/2008
Douglas Sirk's 1959 classic melodrama Imitation of Life is that rare thing - an intellectually provocative film which is also an excellent exercise for the lachrymal glands. Be prepared with at least half a dozen hankies before you watch it. It didn't make me cry (but that is only me) but left me feeling quite bitter. I still prefer his earlier film All that Heaven Allows more which not only has a...
Apartment Therapy LA (Free subscription) | 06/10/2008
Fredrik Färg's 'Coat' chair This past weekend we caught the closing day of the Getty's expansive video art exhibition, California Video, which included a piece by a favourite artist of mine, John Ba
LaurenceJarvikOnline (Free subscription) | 06/10/2008
The red envelope from Netflix last week contained a nice surprise from my own distributor's (KINO International) catalog: Douglas Sirk's A Scandal in Paris . Starring George Sanders and Akim Tamiroff as a couple of French thieves who end up running the police force--Sanders plays François Eugène Vidocq, the 19th century French commissioner of police who penned a scandalous Casanova-like memoir--it...
Thanks for the Use of the Hall (Free subscription) | 05/24/2008
The First Legion is the high point of the driest period of Douglas Sirk's career, the stretch between his adventurous independent American films of the 40s and the full-bodied Universal melodramas upon which his reputation stands today. Transitioning between major studios Columbia and Universal in the early 50s, and stuck with a series of unpromising projects, Sirk went indie one last time to film...
GreenCine Daily (Free subscription) | 05/04/2008
"A waggish conceptual venture, Viva is a startlingly pitch-perfect reproduction of the kind of gauzy sex movies from the 1960s and early 1970s that preceded the hard-core revolution," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Despite the parallels...
In the Company of Glenn (Free subscription) | 04/28/2008
What, exactly, is melodrama? That question came up as I read the Self-Styled Siren's provocative post "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs: A Brief Defense of Melodrama," which itself was inspired a bit by the recent cinema blogosphere fulminations and such on...
ximblr.com (Free subscription) | 04/26/2008
Now here’s a movie with a cast worth salivating over, but what's the point when the end result turns out to be so negligible? I love the direction of Pierce Brosnan's non-Bond career (The Matador, The Tailor of Panama); Patricia Clarkson constantly earns her designation as an indie goddess; Rachel McAdams quickly (and deservedly) gained [...]
Seraphic Secret (Free subscription) | 04/24/2008
Linda Darnell, studio portrait. Scan courtesy of Dr. Macro. I've had the pleasure of working with some of the best directors in Hollywood. On location and in the studio it's always fascinating to collaborate with gifted directors, and then sit back and watch as the actors breathe life into my pages. I've worked with directors who act as Freudian psychologists to elicit the proper emotions from actors....
MilkandCookies.com (Free subscription) | 04/13/2008
"Imitation of Life" was the first single released from R.E.M.'s twelfth studio album Reveal in 2001. The song struggled in the United States where the band's popularity had waned, peaking at #83 on the Billboard Hot 100 (though the song did reach #22 on the U.S. Modern Rock list, also published by Billboard). It was the lowest chart of a lead single from an R.E.M. album in the U.S. since "Fall on Me"...
Salt Lake Tribune (Free subscription) | 03/28/2008
The question "How much do you really know about the person to whom you are married?" gets hashed out in smooth-as-silk fashion in "Married Life," a drama that plays like a movie-genre martini: one part Hitchcock, three parts Douglas Sirk.
Bookgasm (Free subscription) | 03/26/2008
Ah, the fairer sex is once again the topic of discussion in this, my 99th column. (To paraphrase Jay-Z, I’ve got 99 columns … you know the rest.) We have a trio of novels all dealing with women and their troubles. None of these, I’m guessing, are on the NOW reading list. THE COMPANY GIRLS by [...]
SpoutBlog (Free subscription) | 03/21/2008
Fassbinder's ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL and ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, the Douglas Sirk film that inspired it, sit right next to each other in alphabetical order on the Criterion shelf. I *had* to buy them both.
