In her January 1 post, the Self-Styled Siren pays homage to the Japanese actress Hideko Takamine, who died December 28 at age 86. The Siren’s warm comments immediately sent me off to watch When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), which Takamine stars in as the bar hostess Keiko. I’m slightly embarrassed to say that […]
The series of ten Martin Beck novels written by Swedish husband and wife Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall between 1965 and 1975 are not entirely conventional mysteries. They are police procedurals which focus on the tedious sifting of facts and clues which may or may not lead anywhere, in which accident and coincidence often abruptly […]
I find that my viewing habits in recent years have become so random and eclectic that the idea of coming up with a “year’s best” list is not only difficult – it borders on the arbitrary and meaningless. Much of what I watch these days consists of older films either just caught up with, or […]
In his December 26 New York Times column, Frank Rich calls our attention to a fascinating “home movie documentary” called Disneyland Dream. Shot by a Connecticut man named Robbins Barstow, a diligent amateur documentarian who apparently made numerous films about his family’s life and activities, this particular work was named to the Library of Congress’s […]
In their joint commentary track on the Masters of Cinema DVD/Blu-Ray release of the newly restored Metropolis, David Kalat and Jonathan Rosenbaum express some concern that this new version will cause the disappearance of all previous versions. Why should this be a problem? After all, the “restored” Metropolis is the closest we’ll ever get to […]
There is a long, if not necessarily venerable, tradition in the arts of creating confrontational, deliberately offensive work to challenge received ideas and to make people conscious of their own conventional assumptions. When work like this is created, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to get indignant at people who are genuinely offended; in […]
After a brief prologue in which a cult of Satanists is banished from Spain by the Inquisition, Evilspeak (Eric Weston, 1981) transports us to an American military academy where a much abused cadet (Clint Howard, younger brother of director Ron and former child star of TV’s Gentle Ben) discovers a large “hidden” room in the […]
I was recently rooting through a stack of boxes in my mother’s basement and came across my old collection of Cinefantastique magazines. I can’t recall exactly how I first heard about it – I think it might have been a brief announcement by Baird Searles in his occasional movie column in The Magazine of Fantasy […]
In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thompson has a very brief entry on the English director Thorold Dickinson. He implies that Dickinson was a kind of failure, unable to make films and so turning to teaching. Thompson sees him as a sad character, his talent wasted on unworthy students no doubt unaware of who […]
An e-mail this morning from correspondent Jerome Wybon made me realize that it’s unclear from my journal just what format Anatol Pacanowski and I were using to document the production of Dune. Although Anatol initially had wanted to use 16mm film, we ended up with a newly developed combination camera/recorder just being put on the […]