In honor of the late Claude Chabrol, one of the great filmmakers of the French New Wave, co-author with Eric Rohmer of the first book on Alfred Hitchcock, maker of moral thrillers and autopsier of the dis-ease of the bourgeoisie…
The "New Political Correctness," as I came to call it during the aughts (though it is neither new nor correct) is the pressure to reframe discussion by controlling language. In recent years it has come mostly from the political right…
This week in reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times and RogerEbert.com, I was pleased to be able to quote from Joel and Ethan Coen's "Barton Fink" regarding the tradition of the wrestling picture in general and "Legendary" in particular: Ah, the…
Above and behind. That is the dominant position for watching, for following, for shooting, for f***ing, in Anton Corbijn's "The American." Corbijn, the Dutch photographer and director best known for his music videos (U2, Nirvana, Depeche Mode) and his Joy…
It's all here, courtesy of Stephen Sondheim, Mike Nichols and MacLaine: Then you career from career to career... I got through all of last year And I'm here.
Revisiting Dwight Macdonald's famous essay, "Masscult & Midcult," and other ideas old and new -- continued from "When 'I get it!' means 'I don't get it!' and vice-versa." "It seems to me that nearly the whole Anglo-Saxon race, especially of…
I'm late to mention this piece by William Saletan, published in Slate August 23 ("Is a mosque near Ground Zero 'insensitive'?"), which gets to the bottom of this manufactured emotional wedge issue like nothing else I've read. After briskly demolishing…
While reading Dwight Macdonald's famous essay, "Masscult & Midcult," the first version of which was published in 1944, I want to interject a "Yes, but --" or "No, and --" or "Bad example because --" or "But that's not the…
Does this photo ring any (wedding) bells with you? Can you tell me who these people are and what movie they inspired? I'll let you think about it and I'll get back to you... UPDATE: Answer after the jump...
Last week I used a clip from the AMC series "Rubicon"¹ (re-posted after the jump) to illustrate what I felt could be interpreted as a parable about film criticism. Since then, it has come to my attention that "President Obama…
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