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Pictures Taking Pictures - MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1970)
"Myra Breckinridge was born with a scalpel and don't you ever forget it motherfuckers, as the kids all say," Raquel Welch--as post-op woman Myra-- narrates, and you feel that something is definitely...
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"You have my word as an inveterate cheat" - WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? (1965)
With the way Woody Allen's sexual neurosis has--ever since the Soon-Yi thing came to light in the early 90s--gone into a deep WASP-y freeze, it's easy to forget his 60s pro-libido worldview and that...
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CinemArchetype 24: Death
The final frontier. Do we have anything, really, to fear from it? As the kids all say just before being Rube Goldbergianly sliced to ribbons in the FINAL DESTINATION movies, 'it's a part of life, so so...
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Hunter S. Thompson reads Kafka, Dissolves
The animators at Buck made this long-form, award-winning, lovely and deeply hallucinatory riff on Hunter S. Thompson for an all-for-charity online book outlet called Goodbooks.com. One of the best...
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The Black Face of the Glory-Bound Golem: WONDER BAR (1934)
One of my favorite movies is the Paramount musical-comedy from 1933, International House,a giddy sort of Grand Hotel-meets-Asian Exotica--meets WC Fields comedy. It was lightning in a 'hic'' bottle (my...
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His Girl Friday vs. CNN: Boston Edition
The turbulent, tragic events in Boston this past week created a curious time ripple in our 24 hour news channels, and they may never recover. The internet has taken the lead now, and by the time CNN...
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The 5 Final Destinations Nation
 The most effective teen horror films, like HALLOWEEN and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, know that closed-down gold mines or prom trains or the moon or other weird settings don't scare kids; you need to get...
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Pre-Code Capsules - SCARLET EMPRESS, LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT, FRIENDS AND...
SCARLET EMPRESS, THE1934 - ****Von Sternberg was very advanced artistically but one could argue he never quite entered the sound era, preferring the language of symbols, small gestures, and intertitles...
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High Society and the Motherers of Frank
From top: Betty Garrett, Celeste Holm, Vivian BlaineThe enduring image of Mr. Frank Sinatra is as a ring-a-ding-dinging, woo-flinging Vegas lounge wiseguy, crooning and joshing with the Rat Pack and...
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"In the words of my father... Oxnard." - Ghoulardi
For the average auteurist critic, deconstructing an opaque work like Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER (2012) tends to involve making connections to the topographical 'conscious' of the artists' life,...
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Early Hawks: THE CRIMINAL CODE, TIGER SHARK, CEILING ZERO, BARBARY COAST,...
Much as I love Orson Welles, I've never quite forgiven him for his Cahiers du Cinema interview when he was asked about his three favorite American directors and answered, "John Ford, John Ford, and...
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Pharmageddon: JOHN DIES AT THE END (2012) and fuzzy horror
As John Carpenter ages into his RED LINE 7000 phase, a horror genius named Don Coscarelli has quietly stolen the title of the new Hawksian Drive-in fuzzy horror guru. What is fuzzy horror? I can only...
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John Monk Saunders' Flying/Falling Death Drive Circus: THE LAST FLIGHT,...
If you want to deep into the real ambiguity of war, the heart of darkness, look no further than the pre-code 1930s WWIÂ flying ace movies written by John Monk Saunders. With dogfights and aerial...
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Cuspidor of Greatness: DIPLOMANIACS (1933)
The red man was the big manand then came the great big white man a white man? / that's the right man.The whites got the red and the reds got the blues, and the red white and blue was born. The above is...
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Favorite Critic Series - Molly Haskell
Molly Haskell is one of those brazenly feminist cultural critics who prefer to dazzle, excite, and thrill rather than deflate, demoralize, and despair. She's from the generation of women who came to...
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Self-Sabotage for Success - CASINO (1995)
Summer is a time for living dangerously and nowhere is life more dangerous than in the movies about gambling, which is almost meta to begin with, since moviemaking is an intensely expensive venture...
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To drown in a vat of whiskey - NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK (1941)
"last time it was pink elephants..."Why is booze funny? What makes this scourge of human civilization, Homer's "cause of, and cure for, all life's problems" so irresistibly funny even when...
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Independence Daze Streampunk Pick: IRON SKY
It all starts rather predictably: blackstronaut James Washington (Christopher Kirby - way cooler than Will Smith) is the first man on the 'dark' side of the moon, where he's zapped by a Nazi unit and...
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Getting to Own You: CLOUD ATLAS (2012), RUGGLES OF RED GAP (1935)
In my eleven feet of apartment, in a couch gone saggy from my restless weight, armed with a cat and a vast battlefield of diet coke and e-everything, a Revolutionary War documentary narrated by Charles...
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CinemArchetype 22: The Outlaw Pair Bond
"Didn't you realize when we started," asks John Dahl of Bonnie Cummins in GUN CRAZY that once we started we'd never be able to ask anyone for help again, not even if we were dying?" He could be anyone...
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