The twin theses of Damien Chazelle’s Babylon are that A) something indescribable and precious was lost when filmmaking transitioned to sound in the late 1920s, and the art form is worse off for it; and B) the Hollywood film industry is a brutally exploitative place that gathers emotionally broken people all together so they can […]
A review requested by Stephen, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! I think there is a very strong argument to be made that Leo McCarey was the greatest conservative […]
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. Last week: Top Gun: Maverick presents a story about the fraught business of telling young aviators they have to go on […]
In 1936, when the film was new, MGM sold The Great Ziegfeld as the longest talkie ever made, and at 176 minutes (185 in the roadshow version), I certainly can’t dispute that. This of course makes the film my nemesis. Further cementing that antagonism: this was the first biopic to win the Best Picture Oscar,* […]
Worse films have won the Best Picture Oscar than 1933’s Cavalcade, though not many. I think there is a real argument to be made, though, that it is the most defective movie to win that award. Sure, 1929’s The Broadway Melody and 1931’s Cimarron are both weaker technically, with their janky early sound hiccups, and […]
The learning curve for early sound cinema was steep and fast. In the immediate wake of the enormously popular sync-sound scenes from 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the American film indsutry jumped with great enthusiasm and no planning into making some of the most awkward, unwatchable films of its entire history across the course of 1928, […]
1935’s The Whole Town’s Talking is a weird movie. All the weirder still, because it doesn’t in the slightest bit act like it’s weird. But here’s what we’ve got: a variation of The Prince and the Pauper set inside of a ’30s gangster picture, that spends its first act looking for all the world like […]
A review requested by Not Fenimore, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! So here we are, face-to-face with the all-time worst winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture. […]
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: Sicario: Day of the Soldado presents a uniquely ill-timed new take on the old trope of lawmen trying to […]
A review requested by Not Fenimore, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon. Do you have a movie you’d like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! No matter what the industry might like to say about itself every year at the Oscar, Hollywood […]
Between 7 March, 1933, and 22 December, 1933, there elapsed a total of 290 days. That is how long it took after the world premiere of the magnificent King Kong to commission, write, produce, edit, market, and release that film’s extraordinarily deflating sequel, Son of Kong. And really, that kind of says it all, doesn’t […]
I can think of not one single reason to hold back: the first King Kong, from 1933, is probably the most perfect movie ever made by a Hollywood studio in what we would call, I guess, the “popcorn movie tradition” – that is to say, big-budget adventure movies with rip-roaring special effects, or some other […]
