Michael Sporn Animation - Splog (Free subscription) | 10/08/2008
- I received an email yesterday from Tom Sito (who’d heard it from Jeff Massie) that Gerard Salvio died June 23 at the age of 82. Gerard was the last Business Agent for Local 841 of the NY chapter of the Screen Cartoonists Guild. He and I bumped heads quite a few times during the [...]
Something Old, Nothing New (Free subscription) | 08/24/2008
Thanks to Thad for sending me a copy of one of the few Frank Tashlin films I hadn't seen (at least not all the way through), The Lieutenant Wore Skirts starring Tom Ewell and Sheree North. It's a pan-and-scan copy, and it's not anywhere near as good as The Girl Can't Help It or Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? , but it's an interesting movie, not so much for Tashlin or cartoon buffs -- it's one of his...
A.V. Club (Free subscription) | 08/21/2008
They wanted a sequel to the 1984 hit Gremlins . This may not have been what they had in mind.
Something Old, Nothing New (Free subscription) | 07/22/2008
So, like I said, TCM showed Frank Tashlin's first live-action film as a director, The First Time. (It was part of a day of obscure movies from the Columbia library, including one I wanted to see but missed: The Petty Girl , with Bob Cummings and Joan Caulfield.) It was intriguing to see all the Tashlin live-action trademarks in embryonic form: there's a sentimental monologue by a sympathetic middle-aged...
Something Old, Nothing New (Free subscription) | 07/18/2008
Thanks to a reader for reminding me that on Monday, July 21 at 2:30 pm, TCM will be showing Frank Tashlin's first live-action film as a director, The First Time with Bob Cummings and Barbara Hale. (The male lead in this picture was supposed to be played by Larry Parks.) I've never seen this movie but I have heard good things about it, from people who aren't Tashlin buffs and just enjoy it as a charming...
MilkandCookies.com (Free subscription) | 06/23/2008
1945 Merrie Melodies cartoon starring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, released in 1946. the film was directed By Frank Tashlin without credit; Hare Remover ended up being his last Warner Bros. cartoon. Elmer tries his best to make one of those "Jekyll and Hyde potions", but his experiments always end in failure, causing his test animals to run for the hills.
Something Old, Nothing New (Free subscription) | 06/12/2008
Here we see the same gag in two Frank Tashlin films more than 10 years apart: first a wolf trying to eat a single pea as a complete meal in "I Got Plenty of Mutton," then Jerry Lewis doing the same thing with a bean in Artists and Models. Greg Ford mentions on his commentary for "Mutton" that Tashlin also wrote this gag, uncredited, into "Mickey and the Beanstalk," but I haven't seen that in a while....
GreenCine Daily (Free subscription) | 05/27/2008
"Like a missing-link hominid stepping out of the jungle, famous photographer William Klein emerges on 21st century DVD as the great bullgoose Art Film-era satirist we never knew we had," writes Michael Atkinson for the IFC. "The movies in...
Confessions of an Aca/Fan: (Free subscription) | 05/22/2008
A Comparative Perspective Hoberman's most important contribution is the way that his essay takes artists who are often discussed as idiosyncratic within their own medium and reads them collectively and comparatively as part of a larger artistic project that...
The Reading Experience (Free subscription) | 05/01/2008
In a series of posts about director Frank Tashlin and one of his early films, Son of Paleface, Ray Davis writes of the film's star, Bob Hope: Buster Keaton and W. C. Fields drift mildly upwards into their personal unreal,...
Something Old, Nothing New (Free subscription) | 04/30/2008
There's a new dirt-cheap Bob Hope Collection from BCI packaging together the various Hope films that he either owned or bought from the studios. ( Road to Rio, Road to Bali, The Lemon Drop Kid, Son of Paleface, The Seven Little Foys, My Favorite Brunette, The Private Navy of Sergeant O'Farrell, and a couple of others.) These movies have all been released and packaged together before, but the package...
Coffee Coffee and More Coffee (Free subscription) | 04/28/2008
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America David Hajdu - 2008 Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York Artists and Models Frank Tashlin - 1955 Paramount Region 1 DVD I was taking classes in...
Something Old, Nothing New (Free subscription) | 04/11/2008
If you're in or near the Bay area (and I'm not saying you shouldn't be), the University of California at Berkeley is holding A week-long Frank Tashlin retrospective. There have been a bunch of these recently, but all south of the border (the Canadian border, I mean); I especially recommend next Wednesday's screening of Artists and Models because while the DVD version looks fine, I have a feeling that...
FilmStew.com (Free subscription) | 04/10/2008
The University of California at Berkeley mini-retrospective is a start. But what the films of the late Frank Tashlin really require is heavy rotation on MTV.
Coffee Coffee and More Coffee (Free subscription) | 04/05/2008
Irving Rapper - 1942 Warner Brothers Region 1 DVD Now, Voyager is one of those times I set aside my auteurist credentials. I'm pretty certain not all of it is meant to be funny yet I also can't watch...
