Double Feature: The Big Lebowski and The Beach Bum
“Sometimes there’s a man — well, he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there.” Thus the voiceover narration in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski […]
“Sometimes there’s a man — well, he’s the man for his time and place. He fits right in there.” Thus the voiceover narration in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski […]
In times like these, it may sound redundant — to say nothing of that old bugbear, “escapist” — to retreat to the heightened artifice of the studio-bound Hollywood musical. Globetrotting […]
Eleanor Gates began writing novels just after the turn of the century, then turned to writing plays before starting a film production company in 1915. This same trajectory was taken […]
Scanning the horizon for next year’s crop of movies yields the usual mix of excitement and despair. Some things haven’t changed much; franchise sequels continue to suck most of the […]
Among the current decade’s crop of movie neo-musicals, Damien Chazelle’s La La Land stands apart for tapping into traditions uniquely native to film. That is to say, it’s a song-and-dance extravaganza […]
Bye Bye Birdie, George Sidney’s candy-colored adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, arrived in theaters on the eve of pivotal moments in the histories of both the musical genre in […]
The Introduction I had failed to see any of the Astaire-Rogers musicals until early 2014, at which time I was bulking up my working knowledge of 1930s cinema in general. […]
I wasn’t paying much attention this year, to be honest. Real life had a way of directing my gaze to what are admittedly more pressing concerns than who gets Oscar […]
Rolling along past the halfway mark on my chronological Buñuel viewing, I’ve almost reached his extended period of brilliance in the 60s and 70s. You can follow along on my […]
The Introduction I caught up with this late Disney Renaissance film at some point during the mid-2000s, though I had been very familiar with the two pop singles it spawned […]