Scanners
Life in movies (and vice versa)
Or: This IS my beautiful life! How did I get here? The deaths of Andrew Sarris and Bill Sweeney on the same day last week got me to ruminating about my own life with movies and what drew me to…
Or: This IS my beautiful life! How did I get here? The deaths of Andrew Sarris and Bill Sweeney on the same day last week got me to ruminating about my own life with movies and what drew me to…
(or, Who put the mise in the mise en scène?) UPDATE: Here's a new, more color-accurate frame grab -- an unmodified screen capture from the new-ish Blu-ray set of the "Alien Anthology." Look at the frame-grab above from Ridley Scott's…
Tilt-shift photography was made for Wes Anderson, even if he doesn't actually use it. His pictures often look like they were filmed that way, because they are exquisite miniatures. Keith Uhlich and any number of others have referred to his…
"All of us will always owe him everything." -- Glenn Kenny on Andrew Sarris, quoting Jean-Luc Godard on Orson Welles Andrew Sarris, "who loved movies" (as Roger Ebert described him), was long considered the "dean of American film critics." Reading…
"Through my films I'm eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don't know if I'm ever going to get there, but I'm slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I'm 85, I'll…
The visceral impact that Ridley Scott's "Alien" had in 1979 can never quite be recaptured, partly because so many movies have adapted elements of its premise, design and effects over the last three decades -- from John Carpenter's remake of…
"It's the greatest curse that's ever been inflicted on the human race, memory." -- Jed Leland (Joseph Cotten), "Citizen Kane" (1941) Nearly every scene in "The Phantom," the Season 5 finale of "Mad Men," conjures a ghost from the show's…
From Taylor Mali on "Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry" in 2002: In case you hadn't noticed, it has somehow become uncool to sound like you know what you're talking about? Or believe strongly in what you're, like, saying? Invisible question…
Please join me and fellow "Mad Men" video essayists Serena Bramble, Kevin B. Lee and Deborah Lipp over at IndieWire's Press Play blog for a fascinating (if I say so myself) Audiovisualcy roundtable about the show and why it's such…
The other night I had dinner with some longtime film critic friends (mmmmmm, homemade Rogan Gosht!) and we got to talking (and laughing) about the dumb things you overhear people say in movie theaters -- whether at critics' screenings or…