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I have been severely lacking in time to get my link love posts finished (or read other blogs, to be honest…sorry guys!). Some of these have been sitting in a draft post for weeks now, but the posts are good enough (and not time sensitive) that I still want to draw attention to them for anyone who hasn’t happened to read them yet.
Lucking Out and Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by The Self-Styled Siren
There have been a whole lot of posts about Pauline Kael lately, thanks to the recent publication of a new collection of her writings, a new biography of her by Brian Kellow, and a new memoir by James Wolcott that includes many memories of her. This one from the Self-Styled Siren is one of the best, discussing both Kellow’s and Wolcott’s accounts as well as her own uneasy relationship with Kael’s criticism. And that’s a theme among most of the posts, as it is in my own life. I first became aware of Kael as a young film buff, probably thirteen or so, from 5001 Nights at the Movies, a collection of her New Yorker capsule reviews. I didn’t like her at all, finding her dismissive of things I loved for what I thought were all the wrong reasons. I didn’t read anything else of hers for years, until I forced myself to read some of her long-form essays and found someone impassioned about film but incredibly idiosyncratic about it. I still find her difficult much of the time, but she can also be really insightful. The Siren gets at all this and much more. See also articles from Jim Emerson, Dennis Cozzalio, and Glenn Kenny.
It Ain’t the Meat (It’s the Motion): Thoughts
on movie technique and movie criticism by Jim Emerson at scanners::blog
I almost included this essay among the Kael essays linked as “also sees” above, but it really deserves its own place. It starts off dealing with a bunch of quotes either from or about Kael regarding the question of technique and style – Kael resolutely refused to discuss technique on any technical level, arguing that the general public didn’t give a damn and privileging emotional impact over technique. Emerson distinguishes between “technical” and “technique”, showing how an understanding and explication of technique doesn’t necessarily have to be presented technically to readers, but also wrestling with the core of Kael’s populist stance.
Not Appearing in This Film: The Silent Movie Career of Carole Lombard – Sort Of by The Mythical Monkey
A fun piece submitted for a Carole Lombard blogathon in October (yeah, told you some of these were rather old), this one looks back on a part of Carole Lombard’s career that I frankly didn’t know existed. If you’d asked me, I would’ve said Lombard started in film in the early ’30s (I think 1932′s Supernatural is the earliest Lombard film I could name), but I would have been wrong. She actually started in film as early as 1921, when she was twelve. But she’s either invisible in most of these films, the films are lost, or they’re exceedingly lackluster. Still, the Mythical Monkey seeks out what he can, and brings forth a fascinating picture of a beautiful girl who never quite found her niche until screwball comedy came along with 1934′s Twentieth Century.
In Profile: The Life and Films of Bong Joon-ho by Jordan Winter at Anomalous Material
So far in my admittedly limited experience, Korean cinema is pretty fantastic (I think I’ve seen eleven or twelve Korean films and basically loved them all), and Bong Joon-ho is right at the center of it right now. He’s got the crowd-pleasing, genre-bending The Host, and the critical darling Memories of Murder, and a whole lot else. Jordan Winter runs through his whole filmography, finding patterns and connections among the films as well as charting a trajectory for his career, which I certainly hope is only beginning.
Pioneers of Animation: Winsor McKay by Brandie at True Classics
Winsor McCay is justly credited as one of the creators of animation, being one of the first cartoonists to move his drawings to the screen and figure out how to make them move – not only that, he was one of the first to give his animated creations personality and interaction. Brandie has written a great rundown of his career, both as cartoonist and animator (because the two were inextricably connected), and of his importance to early cinema and to animation as we know it today.
Sometimes, You Have to Come Back to The Tree of Life by Greg Ferrara at CinemaStyles
I loved The Tree of Life the minute I saw it, but not everyone did, and I respect that. Greg didn’t love it the first time he saw it, but he went back and watched it again, and this piece is a result of that second viewing. And it’s wonderful. Not only because he now agrees with my love of the film, but because it’s such a lovely piece about how to watch any film, how to let it get hold of you, and because it’s hard to admit complete changes of mind. It’s less of an “aha, got it” moment here, and more that the film just didn’t let him go, and his way of expressing that is perfect.
Sound and Vision: Charlie Chaplin and the Sound of Silence by Carly at the Kitty Packard Pictorial
Charlie Chaplin is well known for continuing to make silent films (well, two of them, at any rate) well into the sound era. But it’s maybe not quite as well known how important sound and music were to him, even in the silent era. He played and wrote music himself, and was one of the earliest people to provide theatres with fully-written score to be played alongside his silents. I knew he wrote scores for some of his films, but I had no idea how deep his appreciation and use of music went until reading this excellently researched and presented article.
Happy Birthday, Louise Brooks by The Mythical Monkey
I try not to include multiple articles from the same source, but this post has been so long in the making that people are oustripping my ability to do that without skipping over great posts. So I had to let a couple of people in here twice. I know virtually nothing about Louise Brooks other than that her hairstyle started a bob craze and that she was in two highly regarded G.W. Pabst films, Pandora’s Box and The Diary of a Lost Girl. Reading this article was a treat, but a sobering one, as Brooks’ life and career seemed constantly undermined by mismanagement and her own poor decisions, despite her obvious talent and appeal. By the end, I really wanted to order a do-over for her – and recommitted myself to seeing whatever films of hers I can find.
Diabolique by Chris at Silent Volume
Chris has been eschewing his usual silent cinema posting diet due to a Clouzot retrospective going on in Toronto, and all his reviews from that are worth reading, but I really liked this one because it both reminded me that I need to rewatch Diabolique and gave me a lot of things to think about that I hadn’t thought of before for when I do, especially in relation to its use of genre. Like, it’s usually billed as a thriller or sometimes a film noir, but I hadn’t really considered how close to horror territory it comes – I’m definitely going to look for way that it genre-bends next time I watch it.
The Great Citizen Kane Debate at True Classics
You can’t run around in film buff circles for five minutes before finding out that Citizen Kane is considered the finest film of all time by many, many people. You can’t run around in such circles for more than ten minutes before finding out that many other people think Citizen Kane is hopelessly overrated. The girls at True Classics take this debate to blogathon form, asking people to write pieces either for or against Kane as the greatest film of all time. I’ve seen the film five or six times and still don’t know which side I come down on, so I didn’t write anything for it, but the bloggers who did participate have some really good perspectives, definitely proving the debate is far from settled.
Czech New Wave series at Bonjour Tristesse
Bonjour Tristesse does a good many marathons to catch up on specific genres of film, and does a WAY better job than I do of actually following through on these marathons. Right now, the Czech New Wave is under scrutiny, at the rate of a few films per week. I’ve seen a few of these films myself, and it’s definitely a movement I like and want to see more of – I’m watching the progress here closely to help guide my own eventual viewing.
Godard Series: Pierrot le fou, etc. at Andy Buckle’s Film Emporium
Meanwhile, Andy Buckle has chosen Jean-Luc Godard, a filmmaker very close to my own heart, as his director of the month, and is going through at least all his major 1960s films. I’m not sure how far he intends to go, and really, there’s no reason I chose to link the Pierrot le fou review as opposed to any of the others, except that Pierrot le fou is one of my favorite Godard films and I think Andy wrote about it very well. Check his “Classic Throwback” category for more reviews – he’s going pretty much in chronological order.
Categories: Featured, Film, The RoundupTags: Bong Joon-ho, Carole Lombard, Charlie Chaplin, Citizen Kane, Czech New Wave, Diabolique, Jean-Luc Godard, Louise Brooks, Pauline Kael, The Tree of Life, Winsor McCay
Two takes on Disney’s Dumbo (released this week on DVD and Blu-ray); Elisabeth observes that Dumbo seems to be much less talked-about, and less-merchandised, than most of Disney’s other films and discusses why that is as well as why it’s an enduring classic anyway, while Jake discusses the intriguing fact that Dumbo was made as a blatant cash grab after the financial losses of Pinocchio and Fantasia, and champions the film as among Disney’s best despite that. It is true, when I think about Disney classics, Dumbo is rarely the first one to come to my head, but it has a charming simplicity and depth of feeling that still hold up. Elisabeth and Jake help show us why (and yes, both do talk about the depiction of the crows).
At some point I need to manage to get a LOT more money somehow so I can buy all these sets being put out by the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF); I’m lucky in that I get to see some stuff like this at Cinefamily and elsewhere around Los Angeles, but there are so many more riches available that I want to see and will likely never be available for renting anywhere. Gotta buy them. :) This set contains two films that were supported by the 
Jim Emerson has been writing about his distaste for Christopher Nolan’s action scenes for years now (if you dig through his archives, there are a whole bunch of posts niggling at The Dark Knight), and now he’s put up a series of video essays talking about incoherence in action scenes, taking them apart shot by shot to show what he means when he says an action scene is incoherent. He starts with a chase sequence in The Dark Knight, but moves on to 
There’s a lot of TIFF coverage going on right now, of course, but I’ve really been enjoying Ryan’s – he’s not only got reviews that focus nicely on the experience of the film, but recaps of the festival-going in general (meet-ups, hangouts, etc.) that give a good feel for what it would be like to be there, and also episodes of his podcast going up covering the festival. I’m jealous, but I’m grateful for people like Ryan who bring a bit of the fest to us.
As canonized as Orson Welles is in the history of cinema, it’s mostly based on Citizen Kane, and to a lesser extent Touch of Evil and The Magnificent Ambersons. At least part of his lionization is certainly his legendary problems with studio intervention, having nearly all of his post-Kane films taken out of his hands to one degree or another. But the fact is that most of his films aren’t easily available to see at all. Even Ambersons had never been on DVD until last week, when it was released ONLY as part of a set with the Citizen Kane re-release. Jeffrey M. Anderson runs through all of Welles’ filmography and discusses the DVD availability or lack thereof of each film.
Ed Howard of Only the Cinema, one of the most considered and erudite film blogs around, posted a piece last week that wasn’t about cinema at all, but about comic books – DC is rebooting their entire line, and Ed is starting out reading every issue (some 13 a week!) to get into the series. I’ve never been a serial comic book reader, but I’m thinking about jumping into these. Ed has since moved the comic book talk over to a new blog, Thinking in Panels, and has the 
Angela’s gearing up a little early for her September 24th Fashion in Film blogathon with this absolutely wonderful piece on the costuming in All About Eve and how the very clothes that the characters are wearing play into character development and story progression. I’m admittedly very fashion backwards, so I rarely notice this stuff beyond “hey, that’s a really pretty dress” (if that, even!). This is a thoughtful and very helpful analysis. And she’s done one on 
A glorious picspam post with tons of screencap and glamour shots of lovely 1930s ladies…and their legs. A shapely gam is pre-Code heaven, and these ladies are the top of the heap. Thanks to Carly for putting this post together! Sometimes a good set of pictures is all you really need, and she excels at that at the aptly named Pictorial.
This week the Mythical Monkey looked back on one of the best screenwriters of the silent and early sound eras – Anita Loos. With a bright wit and a way of making title cards not just informative but fun to read, Loos was one of several female screenwriters who formed the backbone of silent Hollywood writing. She made the jump into sound perfectly well, too – her screenplay adaptation of Clare Booth Luce’s The Women is one of my all-time favorites (I even chose it as the best-scripted movie I’ve seen in the 
This article calling for the end of auteurism and the end of criticism has been making the blogosphere rounds for a few weeks now, even to the point that Kevin B. Lee interviewed the author on the 
I noticed 
Only a few weeks after Joe Cornish’s excellent genre film Attack the Block was released in US theatres, we started hearing reports of riots in London perpetrated by “hoodies,” gangs of kids wearing hooded sweatshirts from the poorest part of London. Hoodies also happen to be the main characters and indeed, the heroes of Attack the Block. Far-removed from both the real-life riots and the setting of Attack the Block in the US, it’s impossible to see one and not think of the other. The rioting has died down now, but this article from Oliver Lyttelton (residing in South London) is still an excellent reading of the two against each other. He wrote it on time; blame me for the delay in recommending it. :)
This article (excerpted from Kermode’s newest book) has been stirring up discussion and controversy since it was posted a week or so ago. The basic premise is that people go to see movies based on hype and are often disappointed and don’t like the tentpole blockbusters even though the box office receipts prove they paid to see them. Kermode argues, if people are going to see a tentpole release because it’s a tentpole release, then they don’t have to be dumb to succeed – you can make intelligent blockbusters ike Inception and make a ton of money AND have audiences who are better satisfied at the end of it all. I think his argument is a bit facile (there are plenty of tentpoles that fail despite hype, and Inception is a fringe case based on Nolan’s name that’s not easily repeatable), but his general stance that we shouldn’t settle for whatever dumb tripe the studios throw at us even if it’s shiny and glossy I can get totally get behind.
Starting off with a general history of burlesque, then moving on to its most famous practitioner Gypsy Rose Lee, then on to Lady of Burlesque, the film version of Lee’s novel The G-String Murders, this post is entertaining from start to finish. Lee was originally meant to star in the film adaptation of her novel, but the role eventually went to Barbara Stanwyck instead, and Brandie reviews the film, recognizing Stanwyck’s contribution to what it otherwise a relatively routine film. I’ve seen the film, but finding out about the background of burlesque and the project’s history was really interesting.
Here Bordwell talks about editing trends in the 1910s, showing the very birth of mature continuity editing as editors start cutting to closeups and insets to add emotional and thematic content to the story. He also looks at some very early 1910s compositions, noting that they often have a lot more going on in the frame than later films – sometimes too much for us to easily figure out what’s going on, as our attention is distrated to different parts of the frame. (Note this is a different thing than using deep focus – a good deep focus shot will have everything available to see, but still be able to draw our attention as necessary for the narrative.) His hypothesis is that people actually understood images differently then, and we have lost the ability to understand compositions like that. Based on my own experiences with certain styles of painting and stained-glass windows, I think it’s an intriguing possibility.
An exposition and appreciation of one of my all-time favorite musical numbers from one of my all-time favorite musicals. I love Gold Diggers of 1933 to bits, and the musical numbers are some of the best Warren and Dubin ever wrote, or Busby Berkeley ever filmed. The film is notable for its very head-on approach to the Depression, and nowhere is that more evident than in this number, as Lara indicates very well.
A genuinely hilarious review of the film that has, in some ways, become the template for romantic dramas. And yet, does it deserve to be? I haven’t actually seen Love Story myself, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of Wilde.Dash’s approach to reviewing it. I literally laughed out loud a few times, and it’s rare that I read reviews that are that engaging.
Angela runs down the whole month of TCM programming, with some excellent recommendations. I do this weekly in my Film on TV posts, but Angela’s focus on TCM means her coverage of their programming is even better than mine, and has more of a focus on classic Hollywood fans. She especially highlights The Story of Temple Drake (Sep 14) and The Constant Nymph (Sep 28), two films that haven’t been seen basically since their release due to censorship and copyright issues, until TCM worked with restoration teams at MoMA and the Library of Congress to bring the two films to the TCM Film Festival. This month is the first time the two films have played on the channel, though, and believe me, they’re both worth it.
A really fun post from the Morlocks, highlighting a whole bunch of bizarrely-titled films – some of the usual suspects like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but also a bunch that I have never heard of before and definitely gave me a good laugh. Not to mention the posters that go along with them are usually priceless as well.
Last Saturday (August 6th) would have been Lucille Ball’s 100th birthday, and the internet rose to the occasion in a lot of places (including Google, whose search page logo was a 1950s TV set that played I Love Lucy clips when you clicked on it), but nowhere more than at the Loving Lucy Blogathon hosted at True Classics. A truly remarkable number of people joined in (I was not one of them, because I’m terrible at keeping up with blogathons), hitting Lucy’s life, her career in film and radio, the I Love Lucy years, and various other aspects of Lucy-dom. I’ve only read a few of the entries so far, but they were excellent – I still hope to delve into the rest at some point. She was a remarkable actress and comedienne (not just in slapstick; her early films can be very dry and sarcastic), plus a very forward-thinking businesswoman who, along with Desi Arnaz, saw the value of television and syndication long before anyone else did. Her legacy will be with us for a very long time.
A guest post on Glenn Kenny’s blog by crime thriller author Lawrence Block, with a quite refreshing look at film adaptation from a writer’s perspective. He takes a pretty healthy view on it, not getting up in arms about changes to his books, but with a much greater understanding of what makes a good adaptation than many filmmakers even have! An enjoyable little read, and he chimes in the comment as well, which are (as always on Some Came Running) worth reading.
I’ve long defending Marilyn Monroe’s quality as an actress and comedienne, and here’s a wonderful post backing me up. Marilyn knew how to use her persona on-screen, as is abundantly clear in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but she also knew how to use it off-screen, in trying to get a take she liked or maintain her power in a scene against more aggressive costars. Bale uses an example of a scene from The Prince and the Showgirl, which I haven’t seen, to illustrate how she takes the upper hand from Laurence Olivier, of all people.
Myrna Loy is easily one of the most consistently watchable and personable stars of the 1930s and 1940s; it was her birthday back on August 2nd, and the Self-Styled Siren was right on hand to give her a lovely tribute, talking both about Loy’s pre-code “exotic” phase where she was repeatedly (and not happily) cast as Orientals or other exotic races and about one of her later comedies, Third Finger Left Hand. The Siren peppers the whole piece with quotes from Myrna’s autobiography, which I’m very anxious to read now. Not only is Loy a great actress and comedienne, livening up dozens of films with her mere presence, but judging from these quotes, she was a wonderful human being.
Bordwell is at his best, I think, when talking about narrative structure, and that’s what he’s largely on about here, discussing innovations in narrative in 1940s film. He brings in a few side examples in the beginning talking about flashback structures (tied into current films like Battle: LA and Limitless, as part of his ongoing thesis that Hollywood narrative technique is still basically classical) and subjective uses of the camera, but quickly focuses in on narrators themselves as a narrative technique, one which was pushed to the limit in the 1940s and 1950s. He points out a lot of the absolutely unrealistic things that films with narrators sometimes do (like show things the narrator couldn’t see, an absolute no-no in first-person fiction that we don’t really notice in films, or have dead narrators, or have characters within a story interact with a non-character narrator). The older films he discusses are all ones I’ve seen a few times (some of them more than a few), and I hadn’t really thought about the way they use their narrators before. Pretty fascinating stuff.
There were so many good posts on TCM’s Movie Morlocks blog this week that it was hard to pick just one. I’m sure someone else choosing would’ve chosen a different one. :) But I really enjoyed this look at early 1930s comedienne Thelma Todd’s works, especially her shorts with ZaSu Pitts. I know Todd from supporting roles in a few films, notably some early Marx Brothers comedies, but had no idea of her lead roles in these shorts (as well as several films with Charley Chase). I don’t know if these are available anywhere, but I’d love to see them. David Kalat gives some background on Todd and her career and then does a close reading of one of the Todd-Pitts shorts, along with tantalizingly brief clips.
I’ve been doing the 
Originally printed as the liner notes for the DVD of Agnès Varda’s autobiographical film The Beaches of Agnès, this is a very nice overview of Varda’s career and recurring themes, as well as specifics about The Beaches of Agnès, a film I haven’t seen but very much want to soon. I’ve loved Varda’s 1960s films, and she’s done a lot more in her life than just make features – she was initially a photographer, and now works mostly in the documentary capacity rather than making fiction films, but even those are few and far between. Seeing her in interviews, though, reveals a very special woman; it’s a treat to get to share in the things she does.
And the Mythical Monkey just doesn’t let up, putting out a third wonderful post about the films of 1917, this one focused on the films Charlie Chaplin made for Mutual Studios, some of the finest work of his career, and almost certainly his best shorts. But this post goes beyond them, talking about Chaplin’s evolution as a director moving from Essanay to Mutual, the formation of his “stock” company (Eric Campbell, Albert Austin, Edna Purviance), and the lead up to the fiilms of 1917, going into specifics about such films as The Vagabond, One A.M. (my personal favorite Chaplin short), Easy Street, The Cure, and The Immigrant. What’s more, he ties them all together with a narrative of Chaplin’s career that makes me feel like I understand Chaplin a little bit better than I did before, even though I’ve seen most of these films many times. This series really can’t be beat for a close look at Hollywood silent cinema.
Usually Chris writes about silent film, but he’s been going to a Neorealist series at the TIFF Lightbox, so he’s got a few reviews up from that, including this one of Vittorio De Sica’s seminal film Bicycle Thieves (aka The Bicycle Thief). It’s been a long while since I saw this film, and I loved it – after reading Chris’s excellent review of it (which brings out a few points that I hadn’t really considered before, like the effect of all this on the young boy), I’m more than due to revisit it.
Another blu-ray review post from Glenn Kenny, a series I’m definitely paying attention to every month. In a whole heap bunch of capsules, he reviews the films, yes, to a degree, but more importantly the quality of the blu-ray disc. This month he reviews an eclectic mix of films including, but not limited to: Kiss Me Deadly, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Black Moon, Inland Empire, Zazie dans le metro, True Grit, People on Sunday, The Big Country, Big Jake, Rio Lobo, Jan Svankmajer’s Alice, Bob Dylan: Don’t Look Back, Drive Angry, Hair, The Island, New York New York, They Live, and Wild at Heart.
