Matt writes: 1987's "Back to the Beach," director Lyndall Hobbs' cheerful send-up of the teen movies with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, received three-and-a-half stars from Roger Ebert before abruptly drifting into obscurity.
An interview with the director of Back to the Beach, now on Blu-ray for the first time.
A tribute to the director of Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens.
A review of Paul Thomas Anderson's "Inherent Vice" from the 2014 New York Film Festival.
Jana Monji writes about our late friend and contributor Jeff Shannon, whose memorial service will be March 16, 2014.
At Disney's D23 Expo, Jani Monji caught up with upcoming animation projects.
Is the director's explicit "The Canyons" the nadir of his career—or its climax?
Woody Allen (foreground, center) in "Stardust Memories."
Regarding issues raised by Brian De Palma and "Redacted" (see below): Here are two frame grab from Woody Allen's 1980 feature "Stardust Memories," a United Artists release. The movie is a Felliniesque comedy (it starts right off as a parody of "8 1/2"), not a documentary. The blown-up image on the wall was taken a dozen years before "Stardust Memories" (February 1, 1968) during the Tet Offensive by Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams in Saigon.
From "Stardust Memories."
The man with the gun is South Vietnamese National Police Chief General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. The man in the plaid shirt, who is or is about to be shot in the head (his death is shown in NBC News footage taken at the same time), is thought to be Nguyễn Văn Lém (or possibly Le Cong Na), and was either a Viet Cong officer or a political operative. His face was disfigured because he had been beaten. The title of the photo, which became instantly famous around the world, is "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon" and it won a Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Photography in 1969. It was widely reprinted and was used as a symbolic image by the anti-war movement.
Adams later wrote in Time magazine: The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths... What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?'Although a number of "galleries and artists" are acknowledged in the end credits of "Stardust Memories" for the use of photos and artworks in the film, the source for this picture is not cited. The film does contain a standard disclaimer, reading: "The story, all names, characters and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons is intended or should be inferred."
Samuel Z. Arkoff, who in some ways invented modern Hollywood, died Sunday of natural causes in a Burbank hospital. The co-founder of American-International Pictures and the godfather of the beach party and teenage werewolf movies was 83.
Great Movies
