Arise My Love – 1940, Mitchell Leisen

  by Allan Fish (USA 1940 113m) DVD2 (Spain only) In Paris with Gusto p  Arthur Hornblow Jnr  d  Mitchell Leisen  w  Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett  ph  Charles B.Lang  ed  Doane Harrison  m  Victor Young  art  Hans Dreier, Robert Usher Claudette Colbert (Augusta Nash), Ray Milland (Tom Martin), Walter Abel (Mr Phillips), Dennis O’Keefe (Joe [...]

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Aching “Blue Valentine” chronicles disintegrating marriage

by Sam Juliano     A dark boat through the gloom— and whither? The thunder roars But still we have each other! The naked lightnings in the heavens dither And disappear— what have we but each other? The boat has gone.                                                                      -D.H. Lawrence      After an opening night screening of his brilliant new film at [...]

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‘The Time of the Hero’ by Mario Vargas Llosa (1963)

by Jaime Grijalba After a long time, and a trippy interlude, I’m back with the debut novel of the recent Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, which was handed to him just recently (December the 10th) after an acceptance speech given three days earlier called ‘In Praise of Reading and Fiction’, which I recommend reading [...]

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Quo Vadis, cinema?

by Allan Fish At this time of year, with the “bah humbugs” behind us, time to reflect…and I find Scrooge is alive and well… It’s strange to be putting fingers to keyboard again.  There’s an old joke about making plans being the surest way to make the almighty laugh.  My plans had been to do a [...]

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Remember the Night – 1940, Mitchell Leisen

  by Allan Fish (USA 1940 94m) DVD1/2 (Italy only) A bit of hypnoleptic catolepsy p  Mitchell Leisen  d  Mitchell Leisen  w  Preston Sturges  ph  Ted Tetzlaff  ed  Doane Harrison  m  Frederick Hollander  art  Roland Anderson, Hans Dreier Barbara Stanwyck (Lee Leander), Fred MacMurray (John Sargent), Beulah Bondi (Mrs Sargent), Elizabeth Patterson (Aunt Emma), Sterling [...]

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Snow Blizzard, “The Illusionist,” “Inside Job,” “Wasteland”(not quite) and “The Conformist” on Monday Morning Diary (December 27)

by Sam Juliano As as I type here on wordpress on Sunday afternoon, we are in the beginning stages of a ferocious snow blizzard that is promising to drop at least 18 inches on on the NYC and northern New Jersey area before it tapers off sometime tomorrow morning.  The potent post-Christmas storm originiated in [...]

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The Sunday Matinee – Cleo From 5 to 7

(by Joel) Cleo From 5 to 7, France, 1962, dir. Agnes Varda Starring Corinne Marchand Story: After a bad visit to a psychic, pop star Cleo Victoire (real name Florence) fears that her recent medical tests will offer a sentence of death. As she wanders the streets of Paris, flitting from rehearsals to sickbeds to [...]

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John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas:War is Over” as timeless as ever

Happy Xmas (War Is Over) ——John Lennon (Happy Christmas, Kyoko Happy Christmas, Julian) So this is Christmas And what have you done Another year over A new one just begun And so this is Christmas I hope you have fun The near and the dear ones The old and the young A very merry Christmas [...]

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1. My Neighbour Totoro

(Japan 1988 86 min) Director / Writer Hayao Miyazaki; Voice Acting Noriko Hidaka (Satsuki) Chika Sakamoto (Mei); Art Direction Kazuo Oga by Stephen Russell-Gebbett Satsuki (ten years old) and her younger sister Mei (four) are moving to the countryside with their father. There they can be nearer to their mother who is being cared for [...]

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Holiday Fever: Tim Burton’s ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’

Copyright © 2010 by James Clark       Though retail displays for Halloween are crisply displaced by Christmas decor on November first, there is amidst the quite drastic change of atmosphere an almost seamless continuity in the plunge toward amusement and thrills. But for adamant partisans of each celebration, there is a world of difference harboring [...]

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