It is not possible to talk about the Hollywood star system or film culture or really mass media in general as those things existed in the 1930s without talking about Shirley Temple. She defines her era in a way that very few movie performers have: she was the most popular movie star in the world […]
By all rights, Neighbors ought to be just another brick in the wall built up by Judd Apatow and the many people whose career he started (Apatow, we should be clear, had nothing to do with the film, outside of being mentioned in the special thanks; but the writers, director, and lead all come from […]
In the history of the Oscars, there are few cases weirder and more impressive than Katharine Hepburn. Not only does she hold a record, unlikely to be matched and surely never to be beaten, of four competitive acting Oscars, all in the Lead category, but her first award came for her third movie role, in […]
“If you want to send a message, use Western Union”, said somebody, famously – Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, and Frank Capra are the most common sources, so it’s probably none of them – but that’s advice that was already long-abandoned before it was ever spoken. The fact is, filmmakers, particularly Hollywood filmmakers well aware […]
There are films about which we say, “people have mixed reactions”, because there are things that are generally liked and things that are generally disliked, and it’s hard to feel much more than a profound ambivalence about it when taken as a whole. And then there are films about which we say, “people have mixed […]
The five films made by the four Marx brothers at Paramount between 1929 and 1933 are the stuff of legend, and the basis for what is likely the most famous career of any comic team in history (and this despite the first of those films, The Cocoanuts, sagging under the weight of an insipid romantic […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: by no means is Moms’ Night Out the highest-profile film of the weekend, but I couldn’t bring myself to […]
The most expensive movie ever made as of 1930 was an independent production. That’s a weird thing on the face of it, except that in 1930, there was a fellow named Howard Hughes running loose in the world, and for all the wonderful advances made in the post-WWII world, we don’t have madcap billionaires to […]
The popular idea of what early sound cinema is like – as pinned down and immortalised by Singin’ in the Rain, which I suspect is where most of us picked up the notion – is broadly correct. Static wide shots that show the entire cast peculiarly clustered around a conspicuous vase, into which they inexplicably […]
If you want to know, in the most profound sense of knowing – the depth of understanding at a level both intellectual and spiritual that imparts true wisdom and not just the recognition of bald facts – if you want to know, with all the fibers of your body, soul, and mind, what corporate accounting […]
If there is one unanswerable criticism of Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S., it’s that the film is entirely shallow. Not, après it’s immediate predecessor Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, that it ends up a trivial pile of nonsense and fluff whose attempt at any kind of humane drama goes massively awry; that it never makes even the pretense of […]
In the waning days of the American silent film, the artform was at the arguable peak of its sophistication as a visual storytelling medium. And there are four films in particular that I would suggest are the very best of the best, among the most sublime examples of what American filmmaking could achieve in the […]
