Part of the Movies About Movies blog-a-thon hosted at Goatdog The great silent comedian Buster Keaton isn’t typically thought of as a cultural commentator; I think most people would sooner point to Charles Chaplin, whose iconic Little Tramp stood in for all men and women trampled by those with money, power and influence. Certainly, Chaplin’s […]
In the misty depths of cinema history, when the very idea of a “multi-reel”, “feature-length” movie was still in its infancy, we come across a bizarre chimera: neither fish nor fowl, neither feature nor short. I refer to the serial, a form born and popularised in the early 1910s, and still alive and kicking in […]
The history of the animated feature film does not begin, as most people tend to think and the Disney corporation tries to imply, with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. Rather, it begins 20 years earlier, with Argentine filmmaker Quirino Cristiani’s satire El apóstol, a film lost after all known copies were destroyed […]
I have seen the future of cinema, and it is a bug-eyed, box-shaped robot. That’s not meant to be a pun about how Pixar’s miraculous ninth feature, WALL·E, is set in the year 2800. Though I’ve certainly made worse puns. No, what I mean is that WALL·E the movie and WALL·E, the obscenely cute star […]
It says something about the inestimable talents of German director F.W. Murnau that he directed not only the single most influential (and almost certainly the finest) horror movie of all time, 1922’s Nosferatu, but also a fable about the the simplicity of pastoral life, 1927’s Sunrise, which also just so happens to be one of […]
One of the chief pleasures of blogging is that you get to set your own rules. Which means, for example, that if I want to take my weekly classic movie review to shill for a new DVD release, then I can damn well do so. Specifically, I’d like to take a moment to talk about […]
In 1921, one of the biggest movie stars in the world made his first feature-length picture, a 68-minute, 6-reel epic that traded on his familiar persona and added a new style of dramatic pathos to his beloved slapstick. By that point, Charles Chaplin was already a bona fide auteur, decades before that word would be […]
Four years after arriving at Fox with Just Pals, Jack Ford had begun to call himself “John,” to go along with the much more serious dramas that he’d begun directing for William Fox. The young director, not yet thirty years old, was on the very verge of greatness, and the studio mogul started to formulate […]
When the January film doldrums hit and there’s just nothing to see, I’ve made sort of a habit, or at least this year makes it a habit, of filling the cold winter nights with whatever sexy box set I got for my birthday/Christmas. This year, that role has been oh-so-ably filled by the magnificent (and […]
Myths and legend tend to gather around these old Hollywood productions until it’s mostly impossible to know the facts, but here is what’s certain: in 1924, 40-year-old Douglas Fairbanks was in the midst of the run of ’20s swashbucklers that made him one of the biggest movie stars in the world, and as one of […]
What’s great about film festivals: I Served the King of England started late and I had to leave without waiting to attend director Jiří Menzel’s Q&A (not that Q&A’s are ever really worthwhile), but I as I snuck out of the theater, I got to see him, from a distance of about 8 inches as […]
My experience of the 42nd Chicago International Film Festival came to an end on Wednesday with a radical departure from the rest of the slate, that somehow seemed weirdly appropriate: Chicago, a 1927 comedy based on a play based on a true story that would ultimately yield two other films and a Broadway musical. It’s […]
