Running down the résumés of BURN, WITCH, BURN!‘s cast and crew, I couldn’t tell which artistic/commercial direction this film would lead me.  It could land in one of two distinct territories:  a flimsy story with fake blood and occasional flashes of tits, or it could be a thinking man’s gothic opera. BURN, WITCH, BURN!‘s director, [...]

I was sitting in Shanghai’s domestic air terminal this week, flipping through a Chinese fashion magazine.  While looking at photos of clothes (an art form that pingpongs between decorative and functional elements, overload and restraint) I decided to grapple with the merits of a lame / fascinating / bizarre / ho-hum movie from 1963. Perhaps [...]

“No matter when one lives in Hollywood, one brings one’s own mental furniture along.”      – Otto Friedrich,  journalist / cultural historian The final (and rarest) episode of Jacques Demy’s Lola film trilogy has made its home video debut this month.   Unlike the first two, MODEL SHOP was in English and shot in Southern California. [...]

At her excellent website Ferdy on Films, etc. Marilyn Ferdinand has called for film bloggers to list their 15 favorite dancers.   CLICK HERE TO READ MY LIST. Doug / PoMo Joan

I was making myself comfortable at a friend’s house, channel surfing while he was getting ready to go out, when I came across the opening credits for a 1968 British film, DUFFY.  The credits were trippy-kaleidescopic, the kind that 2006′s CASINO ROYALE wittily riffed on, so I kept watching.  When the credits were near the [...]

The Harry Ransom Center on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin is an Elysian Fields for film lovers. Among its treasures are the David O. Selznick Archives, the Robert De Niro Archives and the Gloria Swanson Archives. While doing some volunteer research work amidst their film holdings, I unearthed an artifact that [...]

The story of short-lived, A-List wannabe studio, Eagle-Lion Films (1946-1951), can be charted by the quirkiness of its output. OUT OF THE BLUE was one of its first offerings; and it’s a film that proves that (just like great improv) a scramble to keep keep the ball rolling can result in flashes of brilliance. Eagle-Lion’s [...]

The Turner Classic Movie website has a page where movie lovers can vote for the film they’d most like to see issued on DVD. For a while, the Number One title has been The African Queen, to be sure an egregiously overlooked title.  Yet this week, I was totally flabbergasted to see that the one [...]

MELBOURNE — I’m a Cold War baby. I grew up with the constant fear of Nuclear War. So of course, one movie that made a HUGE impression on me as a kid was ON THE BEACH from 1959. In this movie, total nuclear war has occurred and the only place the winds hadn’t carried the [...]