Posted in Hollywood, Uncategorized on Jun 5th, 2008 No Comments »
Summer’s here and with it, the seasonal cinema: big box-office-bursting behemoths. And, no doubt, trailing in their wake will be the inevitable pieces from serious cineastes, bemoaning the success of these vapid entertainments.
This isn’t, I hope, going to be one of them. It’s not that I dispute the critical analysis – how can I? – […]
Posted in Hollywood, War films on Apr 28th, 2008 No Comments »
Seeing as how it’s five years since the tanks rolled in to Baghdad, the statue of Saddam was toppled and we were told it was ‘Mission Accomplished!’, it’s an appropriate time to reflect on the movies that have emerged from our misbegotten adventure in Iraq. After all, there’s an impressive roster: Lions for Lambs, Redacted, […]
Posted in Directors, Hollywood, Stars on Apr 7th, 2008 No Comments »
As Daniel Day Lewis collected his Oscar last month, there was one name absent from his roll call of thank-yous. Not a major omission by any standards, but maybe it would have been appropriate for the newly anointed Best Actor to acknowledge the spectre that hovers above There Will Be Blood, the film for which […]
Posted in Directors, Hollywood, The Future of Film, Westerns on Mar 25th, 2008 1 Comment »
Oh goodie! The western is back! As Peter Wild notes in his interesting article in this month’s Moviemail catalogue, there’s something of a revival in cowboys. 3.10 to Yuma, Seraphim Falls, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford are all set in the old west; The Proposition might be Australian but is […]
Posted in Auteurs, Directors, Hollywood, Writers on Mar 13th, 2008 1 Comment »
So the writers won. The dispute between the Screen Writers Guild and the studios, in which the scribes downed tools for the first time in twenty years has been resolved. Even though the ‘schmucks with Underwoods’ (as Jack Warner called the people that provided his scripts for him) didn’t get everything they wanted, they won […]
Posted in Directors, Hollywood, Lists, Stars, The Future of Film on Feb 27th, 2008 No Comments »
Hi, glad you could make it. Take your seats. The fight’s about to start. In the red corner, there’s Mark ‘Lethal’ Lawson. He wrote a piece for The Guardian recently, saying how future generations will regard ours as a golden age of movies, comparable to the 1940s and the 1970s. He cited things like No […]
Posted in Hollywood, Stars on Jan 2nd, 2008 2 Comments »
One of the more depressing bits of news to filter out of Hollywood in 2007 was that our friends the studios have decided not to make any more dramas with female leads. This has been on the cards for a while, after a string of underperforming films starring the likes of Nicole Kidman, but after […]
Posted in Directors, Hollywood, Stars, Style on Dec 11th, 2007 No Comments »
I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘style’ recently, not least because I’ve just re-watched six of the seven films Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich. As you might have read in my previous post, they’ve overwhelmed me somewhat: you don’t write posts that long unless you’re besotted.
Sad to say, I’m not finished yet. That […]
Posted in Directors, Hollywood, Stars, Style on Dec 4th, 2007 No Comments »
I’ve been going through the 18 disc Marlene Dietrich: The Movie Collection. It’s a big box filled – as I suspect you’ve already guessed – with 18 films which feature Marlene Dietrich in some capacity. At the time of writing, MovieMail are offering it for about sixty notes, which makes it the bargain of the […]