For better or worse, Jacques Tati’s cinematic fate was tied to his beloved character Mr. Hulot, a floppy everyman in a raincoat and high-water pants played by Tati himself. Hulot appeared in four of the six features he directed, beginning with M. Hulot’s Holiday in 1953 and continuing with Mon Oncle (1958), Playtime (1967) and [...]
Here’s a clip with the late Paul Newman in The Hudsucker Proxy. Enjoy!
In Jules Dassin’s The Naked City, Barry Fitzgerald is so over-the-top, cloyingly Irish I want to hit him. He stops just short of drinking green beer and saying “faith and begorrah.” I am surprised that the Irish Anti-defamation league (is there really such a thing?) doesn’t have a big black mark next to the movie.
There, [...]
I’ve been tagged twice for this latest movie meme — once by Joe Campanella over at Cinema Fist, and once by Fox at Tractor Facts (and some time ago, I might add), so I guess I’d better do it. They’re supposed to be 12 movies I haven’t seen and want to. Further, they’re supposed to [...]
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Madeline Kahn in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles.
Ok, so it’s not a trailer. But I’ve been thinking a lot about film ethics lately (and taking it out on some hard-working bloggers). It’s something I know little about, except the basic arguments surrounding realism and expressionism and the like. But it seems to me that it’s something that is in short supply [...]
What is it about gas stations in 1940s films noir? In Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, the Swede (Burt Lancaster) is working at a gas station in a bucolic little town when his past catches up with him, and in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past its the same thing. Former P.I. Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) [...]
Peet Gelderblom’s sly comic strip “Directorama” is back on the Web, in a shiny, brand-new blog named, appropriately enough, Directorama. Peet’s a filmmaker from “the heart of Holland,” as he puts it, who directs commercials and TV programs for an Amsterdam company. There’s a few bugs yet over at his new home, but I hope [...]
The folks at Criterion have been busy little bees lately. They’ve released three (!) films by Max Ophüls, a remaster of Pier Paolo Passolini’s notorious final film, plus six films from Janus’ Essential Arthouse collection in economical, bare-bones editions.
Ophüls’ film career spanned 25 years and three countries, beginning in his native Germany in 1931, followed [...]
Roger Ebert’s blog is quickly becoming one of my favorite stops on the ol’ Internet Highway. There’s an humanism about his writing, and a sense of wonder about the movies that all his years as a film critic have yet to blunt. I think he’s softened a bit since his health problems became so serious [...]
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