Terrence Malick’s masterpiece “The Tree of Life” a rapturous philosophical inquiry

by Sam Juliano For the second time in five years an American director has crafted a cosmic, impressionistic light show with profound spiritual underpinnings and an existential inquiry into the meaning of life and the indominability of love in the general scheme.  Terrence Malick’s long anticipated The Tree of Life, like it’s 2006 cinematic soulmate [...]

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Buster Keaton, Bob Clark, “The Tree of Life,” “Midnight in Paris” and staging of Tennessee Williams’s “One Arm” on Tuesday Morning Diary (May 31)

by Sam Juliano With the Memorial Day weekend behind us. the summer season is now a matter of weeks away.  Excessive heat is no doubt in the cards, much as the mindless blockbuster entertainment that maligns our movie screens during this down time for ardent cineastes.  In any case, there are some notable exceptions to [...]

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Dance of the Seven Veils – 1970, Ken Russell

by Allan Fish (UK 1970 57m) not onDVD By Strauss p  Ken Russell  d  Ken Russell  w  Ken Russell, Henry Reed  ph  Peter Hall  ed  Dave King  m  Richard Strauss  ch  Terry Gilbert  art  Derek Dodd  cos  Shirley Russell Christopher Gable (Richard Strauss), Judith Paris (Pauline Strauss), Kenneth Colley (Hitler), Vladek Sheybal (Goebbels), James Mellor [...]

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Monday Morning Diary will become Tuesday Morning Diary on this holiday weekend

This week’s Monday Morning Diary will be offered up on Tuesday, June 1st, in deference to the three-day Memorial Day weekend stateside.   This is the normal way to proceed at WitD in the instance of extended weekends.  As a result the time period covered by this week’s Tuesday Morning Diary will take in eight days, [...]

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Would You Like To See More? Tetsuro Amino’s “Starship Troopers”

It isn’t uncommon for a previously existing work, like a novel, to find itself adapted many times for any given medium, and for one of its eventual incarnations to stand tall above all the others, supplanting at times even the original source-material itself. There’s been countless screen versions of the works of William Shakespeare, Jane [...]

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Cinema as Archaeology – Bu Wancang’s masterpiece Love and Duty (1931)

by Allan Fish (China 1931 152m) not on DVD Aka. Lian’ai Yu Yiwu Gossip is a fearful thing p  Lay Min Wei  d  Bu Wancang  w  Chu Shek Lin, Jeffrey Huang  novel “Symphony of Shadows” by S.Rosen Hoa  ph  Huang Shaofen  art  William Kolland, Chao Fuh Ruan Lingyu (Yang Nei Fan/her daughter), Jin Yan (Li [...]

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Son of Man – 1969, Gareth Davies, by Dennis Potter

by Allan Fish (UK 1969 90m) not on DVD Love your enemies p  Graeme MacDonald  d  Gareth Davies  w  Dennis Potter  ph  Robert Wright  art  Spencer Chapman  cos  Dinah Collin Colin Blakely (Jesus), Brian Blessed (Peter), Robert Hardy (Pilate), Edward Hardwicke (Judas), Bernard Hepton (Caiaphas), Godfrey Quigley (Roman commander), Patricia Lawrence (Procia), Between the years [...]

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Getting People Over the Beatles: A Series Examining the Greats of British (and UK) Pop Music (part 25, in 3 parts)

by Jamie Looking to tackle Liverpool acts, a city the Guinness Book of Records declared the ‘City of Pop’ due to the inordinate amount of number one records it has produced (62 in the UK to date), it was obvious that I tackle the Merseybeat sound in some fashion as it was originally the Beatles [...]

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“What? What Don’t I Understand?” The Coens’ Barton Fink

Copyright © 2011 by James Clark        The Coen brothers have produced an extensive series of extremely provocative films. That the works emit a jaundiced sense of predominant rationality would seem to be a given. Far less manageable is the specific point of contention, as presumably providing nuance to the mayhem and devastation that ensue. [...]

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Winstanley – 1975, Kevin Brownlow, Andrew Mollo

by Allan Fish (UK 1975 95m) DVD1/2 Common treasury of livelihood p  Kevin Brownlow, Andrew Mollo  d  Kevin Brownlow  w  Kevin Brownlow, Andrew Mollo  novel  “Comrade Jacob” by David Caute  ph  Ernest Vincze  ed  Sarah Ellis  m  Sergei Prokofiev  art  Andrew Mollo  cos  Carmen Mollo Miles Halliwell (Gerrard Winstanley), Jerome Willis (Gen.Fairfax), Terry Higgins (Tom [...]

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