I’m not joking:  GODZILLA vs. THE SMOG MONSTER is a multi-layered, supremely heightened movie experience that can bless an appropriately receptive viewer with enormous gratifications by the final fade-out. However – the producer of the Godzilla series, Tomoyuki Tanaka, disagreed.  Hospitalized during the film’s production, Tanaka went virtually apoplectic when he saw the finished work, [...]

While in New York recently, I caught the Tim Burton retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.  In addition to the staggering displays of prized artifacts, MoMA hosted a screening series of Burton’s favorite films, including Disney’s post-War animated delectation THE ADVENTURES OF ICHABOD AND MR. TOAD, the 1974 all-star disaster (in more than one [...]

The ultimate spoiled rich kid, Kim Jong-il, is also a wannabe movie maker. In addition to being the national movie critic, he wrote a Marxist book on the art of cinema.  From the sketchy information about Kim that has been gleaned from the other side of the Bamboo Curtain, he’s allegedly a big fan of [...]

On December 30th, 2009, the Library of Congress announced the next twenty-five films chosen for preservation in the National Film Registry, merited on their “enduring importance to American culture.”  On the list was the 1975 animated short QUASI AT THE QUACKADERO by Sally Cruikshank. As the Library of Congress announced: “Quasi at the Quackadero” has [...]

Association of Moving Image Archivists St. Louis November, 2009 FIRST BLOG POST FROM AMIA CONFERENCE St. Louis gave the world ice cream cones and Agnes Moorehead, Nelly and T. S. Elliot, Masters & Johnson and peanut butter.  But this week, the world is giving something righteously awesome back to this cool city as the Association [...]

Director Ang Lee’s 1997 film THE ICE STORM dramatized the risks and perils of Modernity.   Today when “new” means “contemporary” and Modern is out-dated — losing its power to the next wave, PostModernism — it’s hard to conceive or convey what Modernism was all about.   THE ICE STORM laid bare the personal perils [...]

For a couple of decades, producers in Turkey cranked out unlicensed ripoffs of Hollywood movies:  RAMBO, STAR TREK, E.T., THE EXORCIST, STAR WARS, etc. Aysecik ve sihirli cüceler rüyalar ülkesinde (literally, Aysecik in the Land of the Magic Dwarfs) was the Turkish take on THE WIZARD OF OZ.  It’s pretty primitive filmmaking:  there’s even a [...]