View image The Dangerous Woman pays a final visit -- with a smile. From the ending of "A Prairie Home Companion" (2006). I'm off this week, but I needed to personally acknowledge the death of Robert Altman, the first great…
Interviews
Slate says it has a copy here. One page, easy to read in a couple minutes, and pretty darned comprehensive. Including: "This is the entire agreement between the Participant and the Producer or anyone else in relation to the Film,…
View image Catherine O'Hara, the funniest person on the planet, with John Michael Higgins, who's no slouch himself. Please note that, in the list of Categories in the column at right, there is one topic that still has no entires.…
Here is Borat ridiculing people who are not in on the joke so that you can feel socially superior, according to Christopher Hitchens and David Brooks. British crank Christopher Hitchens has been writing about Borat's Kazakhstan for years, only he…
View image A shot from Steven Soderbergh's "The Good German." David Bordwell has a capacious post (with 23 illustrative images) beautifully assaying the Hollywood custom of coverage -- basically, the industry practice of "covering" a scene by shooting it from…
The Sunday New York Times Magazine devoted itself to comedy this weekend -- and you know how funny the New York Times Magazine can be. Actually, there's a very good article by A.O. Scott on the art of the pratfall…
Here's a prime example of the kind of cross-pollination on the Internet (and between blogs most of all) that I find so exciting and rewarding. I first learned from Andy Horbal at the movie blog No More Marriages! that Rob…
View image Yes, they were fully paid for damages. Salon has a work-in-progress round-up of the stories behind various staged and/or improvised scenes in "Borat." (See Comments discussion below.) Here's one I was particularly curious about: David Corcoran, the most…
Another exercise in Godardian film criticism (making a movie as a critical response to another movie): This one's simple and straightforward (existing footage; new soundtrack), but it makes its points unimprovably. I don't mean to pick on "Bobby" (which opens…
Great Movies