Some Came Running (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
Last week's installment, #5, here. Follow the links at that post to access the other prior films in the series. Farber: "An adroit, scholarly example of sound storytelling that every Message Boy should be made to study as an example...
Some Came Running (Free subscription) | 11/15/2009
Last week's installment, including links to previous weeks, here. Farber: "A tabloid melodrama of sex and avarice in suburbia, our of Cain by Joe Losey, featuring almost perfect acting by Evelyn Keyes as a hot, dumb, average American babe who,...
TheCelebrityCafe.com (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
A comprehensive examination of manuscripts rich in art and language.
Some Came Running (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
Previous installments here, here, and here. Farber: "Howard Hawks's science-fiction quickie directed by Christian Nyby; fast, crisp and cheap, without any progressive-minded gospel-reading about neighborliness in the atomic age; good airplane take-offs and landings; wonderful shock effects (the plants that...
Blogcritics: Books (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
The complete critical writings of film critic Manny Farber collected in one volume. Film criticism - Manny Farber - Arts - movie - Literature
Some Came Running (Free subscription) | 11/01/2009
Parts #1 and #2: Here and here. Farber: "Good coarse romantic-adventure nonsense, exploiting the expressive dead-pans of Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, a young man and a young woman who would probably enjoy doing in real life what they have...
mosses from an old manse (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
more on the collected Manny Farber reviews--“All physical matter seems to be coated: buildings are encased in grids and glass, rooms are lined with marble and drapes, girls are sculpted by body stockings, metallic or velour-like materials. A subtle pornography seems to be the point, but it is obtained by the camera slithering like an eel over statuesque women from ankle across thigh...
mosses from an old manse (Free subscription) | 10/23/2009
a collected Manny Farber...The hard-bitten action film finds its natural home in caves: the murky, congested theaters, looking like glorified tattoo parlors on the outside and located near bus terminals in big cities. These theaters roll action films in what, at first, seems like a nightmarish atmosphere of shabby transience, prints that seem overgrown with jungle moss, sound tracks infected...
Some Came Running (Free subscription) | 10/25/2009
For context, see here. Farber: "Sam Fuller's jagged, suspenseful, off-beat variant of the Mauldin cartoon, expanded into a full-length Korean battle movie without benefit of the usual newsreel clips. Funny, morbid—the best war movie since Bataan. I wouldn't mind seeing...
Some Came Running (Free subscription) | 10/18/2009
... us the likes of Tales of Hoffman and Rashomon . And none of those pictures are even mentioned in Manny Farber's article " 'Best Films' of 1951," published in the January 5, 1952 number of The Nation. "Let Stevens and Kazan win their Oscars," Farber announces right off the bat; " The Nation 's Emanuel—a life-size drip celluloid statue of Kirk Douglas, ranting and disintegrating...
Self-Styled Siren (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
... movies and acting--not gossip. Drop everything for this one. Glenn Kenny continues his series on Manny Farber's Top Ten Films of 1951 with The Thing from Another World . Sheila O'Malley, never a woman to shirk a challenge, goes after The Birth of a Nation . T. Sutpen at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger posts a series of World War II Red Army photographs . Posed or not, some of them...
Elusive Lucidity (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
Alone. Life wastes Hans Epp (the merchant of four seasons). He, like Heidegger, goes for walks a lot, and thinks. Like Visconti with the aristocracy, Fassbinder was a filmmaker with a great understanding toward the (his) petit bourgeoisie. Manny Farber suggested that physical discomfort is at the core of RWF's work; and indeed there are so many moments where his characters simply fall...
Hell on Frisco Bay (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
... has made it onto local screens during this time: Goodbye South, Goodbye , which the since-departed Manny Farber selected to be screened alongside his appearance at the 2003 San Francisco International Film Festival , where the legendary critic received the Mel Novikoff Award and was interviewed on the stage of the Kabuki Theatre in an intimate afternoon event. Until now. The Yerba...
The Film Doctor (Free subscription) | 11/06/2009
---How you can tell that Charles Bronson is a man. ---Recommended reading: Farber on Film : The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber , edited by Robert Polito. In a review of the new book, Howard Hampton notes some surprising aspects of Farber's critical method: "1) The notion of what movie to see and what to avoid is secondary to opening up new ways of looking at...
Cinematical (Free subscription) | 11/02/2009
... thing to explore the mood and structure of a film. And even the rare critic that did that, such as Manny Farber or James Agee , tended not to go crazy over Hitchcock's work. (He was too popular and supposedly did not need defending.) At the time, it was more important in film to have a strong moral message, or to impress audiences with size and scale. Hitchcock worked in the lowest...
