On Luchino Visconti’s ‘The Leopard’

  by Kaleem Hasan It is not easy to nominate a film to equal let alone surpass the Leopard in the much attempted though rarely successfully realized art of translating literary writing to cinema. To remain true to two art forms at one and the same time is always a tall order and yet Visconti [...]

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“The Big Heat,” “Human Desire,” “Woman in the Window,” “Scarlet Street,” “Biutiful” and Stage Play “Molly Sweeney” on Monday Morning Diary (January 31)

by Sam Juliano The harshness of winter continues to exert all kinds of practical adversity to those in the Northeast, but others in the midwest and the south have fared little better in this most infamously memorable of seasons.  While framing the events of a blog which are experienced and enacted in a largely ‘indoor’ [...]

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Reflections on a ‘Black Swan’

by Tony d’Ambra Natlie Portman in Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Black Swan’ The White Swan is dead The wraith in the mirror A thousand and one shards of shattered glass dissolve into a bloody cascade A cosmic alchemy The red phoenix rises into a hurricane of abandon Monochrome The black swan pirouettes into and out of the [...]

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The More Things Change: Hideaki Anno’s “Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance”

By Bob Clark When Hideaki Anno began his Rebuild of Evangelion series, retelling the story of his infamously popular anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, it would’ve appeared at first to be nothing more than just another stab at “Special Edition” filmmaking, the kind of approach that George Lucas took when he revisited his original Star Wars [...]

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Jaime’s Top 20 Films of 2010

by Jaime Grijalba. So, here I am, after all my talk about doing my list in february I’m doing it now. Why? Well, I was checking my blog archives and it turns out I always posted my list a couple of days after the Oscar nominations, an ocassion that always bring me some sort of [...]

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Angèle – 1934, Marcel Pagnol

by Allan Fish (France 1934 164m) not on DVD The clock has stopped p  Marcel Pagnol  d/w  Marcel Pagnol  novel  Jean Giono  ph  Willy Faktorovitch  ed  Suzanne de Troeye, André Robert  m  Vincent Scotto  art  Charles Brun Orane Demazis (Angèle Barbaroux), Fernandel (Saturnin), Jean Servais (Albin), Henri Poupon (Clarius Barbaroux), Edouard Delmont (Amédée), Annie Toinon [...]

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Getting People Over the Beatles: A Series Examining the Greats of British (and UK) Pop Music (part 9)

essay by Jamie Thinking more about the initial Mod explosion in England in the mid-1960′s, something last week I traced to the starting point, or backbone of all English pop music (specifically guitar pop), I’ve been somewhat startled to the fact that only two bands really hold any notoriety in most pop listeners imaginations (‘Mod’ [...]

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Dreams Within Dreams: Fassbinder’s “World on a Wire”

By Bob Clark There’s an interior-decorating philosophy that espouses the idea of using mirrors to make a small room look bigger. I don’t know if it’s related to fung shui, or perhaps just a very basic recognition of the power of duplicated imagery, but there’s something about it that can work rather well, and at [...]

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10 Nods for ‘True Grit’ Big Surprise of Oscar Nominations

by Sam Juliano      Is the Coen Brothers’ True Grit now officially the “Oscar” film for 2010?  Will the western re-make now lose it’s luster in the eyes of those who look down their nose at anything and everything Oscar and awards shows, and eternally see the embrace of the Golden boy as the artistic [...]

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Finis Terrae – 1929, Jean Epstein

by Allan Fish (France 1929 80m) not on DVD The end of the world p  Serge Sandberg  d/w  Jean Epstein  ph  Joseph Barth, Gustavo Kottula, Louis Née, R.Tulle  m  Robert Israel Gibois, Jean-Marie Laot, Malgorn, François Morin, It’s a commonly accepted belief that the pioneer of the docudrama was Robert Flaherty, that erstwhile traveller and [...]

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