Great Movies
Interviews
We’re So Short on Time: John Sayles on Lone Star
An interview with the legendary writer/director on the eve of the Criterion release of one of his best films.
An interview with the legendary writer/director on the eve of the Criterion release of one of his best films.
Matt writes: Leonard Maltin's invaluable Movie Guides were IMDb before the dawn of the internet. I was always impressed by how he managed to capture the essence of a picture in only a few sentences, and now the iconic film critic has graced us with a memoir, Starstruck: My Unlikely Road to Hollywood, that is guaranteed to be a must-read for film buffs of all stripes.
The movie questionnaire and 2015 reviews of RogerEbert.com editor Matt Zoller Seitz.
Editor in Chief Matt Zoller Seitz responds to our Movie Love Questionnaire.
Bob Fosse's masterpiece "All That Jazz" jumps back and forth through the past and the present, and through memory and fantasy, but it also collects the history of film editing in one story.
"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 past. "Mad Men," like many great series from "Hill Street Blues" to "SCTV" to "The Sopranos," has always been exceptionally good at this (see "The Long Walk"), setting images, gestures and emotions reverberating off one another across episodes and seasons. The series has a memory, and the curse of memory is a primary theme of "The Phantom," which is why the episode is composed as it is. As Nancy Sinatra sings in that final song:
You only live twice, or so it seems, One life for yourself and one for your dreams.
(Spoilers from here on out.)
That's a James Bond theme song, from "You Only Live Twice" (1967) -- and it's the second Bond theme we hear in the episode, after Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass bite into Burt Bacharach's theme from the James Bond parody "Casino Royale" (1967) at the weekday matinée where Don (the suave, masculine Bond of New York advertising) runs into Peggy. (The Beatles, who have figured prominently in Seasons 4 and 5, released "Help!" in 1965 and it was in part a 007 parody, too -- especially the John Barry-like orchestral music written by George Martin.) Echoes and repetitions are everywhere.
Marie writes: Belgium club member Koen Van Loocke has submitted the following and it's so awesome, I have no words. But first, background..The Cinematic Orchestra is led by composer/programmer/multi-instrumentalist Jason Swinscoe, who formed his first group "Crabladder" in 1990 while a Fine Arts student at Cardiff College. The group's fusion of jazz and hardcore punk elements with experimental rhythms, inspired Swinscoe to further explore the musical possibilites and by the time the group disbanded in the mid-'90s, he was playing DJ at various clubs and pirate radio stations in and around London.
