Sgt. Balzac in Home Alone.
Jewish Christmas Choices in NYC
The Great Dictator at IFC, Mel Brooks marathon at 92Y Tribeca or renting some Hitchcock. Which do I pick?
Some Videos About a Book About a Film That was Never Made
(Thanks Bo0k Soup)
Reviewed: Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box By Jacques Boyreau
Fantagraphics Books, 200 p. Reviewed by Matthew Caron “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” So said Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, to a 1982 congressional panel investigating the legal quandaries presented by the VCR machine and the Record button in particular. The movie industry’s fear of VCR was soon proved baseless as home video […]
Reviewed: Cinema Of Obsession: Erotic Fixation and Love Gone Wrong in the Movies By Dominque Mainon and James Ursini
Limelight Editions, 392 Pages Reviewed by Matthew Caron Lovers of fluffy romantic comedy will find little to like about Cinema Of Obsession, a meticulous survey of the movies’ many ventures to dark side of love and sex, but then I bet they don’t read many books anyway. The rest of us, however, are in for a treat. Dominique Mainon and James Ursini’s survey of obsession and fixation in cinema is as academically accomplished as it is fun and sexy. Broken […]
Learning to Love Robert Altman
By Jason Diamond There is hardly any film director that I have tried to force myself to like as much as Robert Altman. I’ve seen MASH twice, and couldn’t get into it; fallen asleep attempting to get into Nashville, and honestly, basing a film off anything Garrison Keillor-related makes me cringe a little bit, so I skipped his final piece of work. But then something changed when I saw his 1973 adaption of Raymond Chandler’s novel, The Long Goodbye. It […]
Wholphin #9 preview
Not shocking that there is so much Spike Jonze stuff on this one, since I’m guessing he and Eggers are probably attached at the hip these days. Naturally this is all very good stuff, as all of the Wholphin series seem to be. All the info (courtesy of McSweeney’s e mail robot), is after the trailer. Wholphin No 9 features three, hilarious, never-before-seen short films by Spike Jonze; Joseph Gordon-Levitts adaptation of Elmore Leonards short story, “Sparks,” starring Carla Gugino […]
Reviewed: Not Quite Hollywood, Directed by Mark Hartley
Reviewed by Matthew Caron Released by Magnolia Pictures Just released to DVD this week is Not Quite Hollywood, a documentary examining Australia’s so-called Ozploitation flicks by director Mark Hartley. Not Quite Hollywood relates the story of filmmaking in Australia from its surprisingly late birth in the grindhouses and drive-ins at the tail end of the 1960s. Australia produced nothing at the beginning of that decade, but as international productions increasingly began to use the country as a location and employed […]