Every Sunday 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: pretty much everybody can tell you how Friends with Benefits fits into the strange trend of 2011 fuckbuddy movies, […]
If Badlands defined the look of a Terrence Malick film, the themes and the humanity, it took his exemplary sophomore effort Days of Heaven to establish the filmmaker’s most characteristic hallmark: his idiosyncratic editing language, intuitive and fluid, and not at all beholden to the decades-old system of continuity editing dominant in American filmmaking. Days […]
Matt Henderson donated to the Carry On Campaign with these words: “No real essay to commission, but I will gently nudge you into considering a Malick retrospective”. Absolutely no nudge was necessary: I’ve been planning on doing this ever since the day The Tree of Life was announced. Still, I’m glad to dedicate the following […]
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: movies with “Exorcism” in the title tend to be barrel-scraping exercises indeed, and how nice of The Last Exorcism […]
This is, I think, a nice opportunity to take stock. Alan J. Pakula directed three of the most significant films of the 1970s New Hollywood Cinema in his loosely-defined “paranoia trilogy”: Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men. I have argued that Klute in particular is not just significant, but is one of the […]
With his brace of mid-’70s paranoia epics out of his system, Alan J. Pakula’s career settled back into a much more characteristic mode when he made his fifth feature two years after the critical and commercial triumph of All the President’s Men. 1978’s Comes a Horseman would prove to be a fairly intimate, domestic story […]
I think that it is possible that no film in history before The Passion of the Christ could have been as theoretically unsuspenseful as All the President’s Men. President Richard M. Nixon was tied to the conspiracy to cover-up the White House connections to the attempted bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, and resigned […]
With his fourth feature, Alan J. Pakula made a fairly decisive break with what had been his most easily definable thematic concerns up to that point, and thereby created one of the two films that have since absolutely secured his position as one of the great American directors of the 1970s. Prior to 1974, we […]
When we last left the career of Alan J. Pakula, he had just completed the first of his major thriller-mysteries, Klute. Hindsight tells us that the director would become one of the decade’s most important makers of such movies, and thus we could be tempted to assume that he’d found his “correct” path as a […]
When I included Alan J. Pakula on my poll for who most deserved a full-on retrospective (mostly at the urging of a friend, who wanted to see Pakula get his proper consideration as one of the great directors of the 1970s), it was with no small trepidation; though I didn’t think he’d come anywhere close […]
Before he became one of the most influential and arguably the most under-appreciated directors of the New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s (and long before he became one of the many New Hollywood filmmakers to turn into a parody of themselves in the ’80s and ’90s), Alan J. Pakula was a movie producer of no […]
In the spring of 1979, a 36-year-old nobody got a chance to make a TV movie. I take that back, not a nobody: he’d written a few episodes of some different cop shows, and directed an episode of the Angie Dickinson series Police Woman, and lest we forget, back in the ’70s there was no […]
