Geometric Cosmology now, you already know that this is a collection of stories and what makes it novel is the relationship among those stories. Many stories have stories within them. Many stories are mirrored. Characters and sets in one story appear in another, sometimes in...
Four vignettes about the lives of the Cuban people set during the pre-revolutionary era.
Sculpted Spatial Force this the best film ever made? For me today in its afterglow it is. I'm so fickle. I think if all else were equal, I'll always take embodied, real cinema that is coherently integrated. The way of telling the story is ideally complex...
The Man With No Name enters the Mexican village of San Miguel in the midst of a power struggle among the three Rojo brothers and sheriff John Baxter. When a regiment of Mexican soldiers bearing gold intended to pay for new weapons is waylaid by the Rojo brothers, the stranger inserts himself into the middle of the long-simmering battle, selling false information to both sides for his own benefit.
Joe Meets Akira is an ineptly made film, but which lives because of its sheer importance. It is the reconstruction of the western, the birth of the hardboiled, loveable thug and the reinvention of Kurosawa for the masses. Kurosawa had already been appropriated by the Hollywood...
A group of British children aged 7 from widely ranging backgrounds are interviewed about a range of subjects. The filmmakers plan to re-interview them at 7 year intervals to track how their lives and attitudes change as they age.
Preparatory did not start as a folded adventure. It is a quite ordinary TV documentary. But it became so in later installments by Apted, where the interviews are largely about how the films affected their lives....
Special agent 007 comes face to face with one of the most notorious villains of all time, and now he must outwit and outgun the powerful tycoon to prevent him from cashing in on a devious scheme to raid Fort Knox -- and obliterate the world's economy.
Two Zeros is the best of the Bonds, in part because the action/gizmo genre was so young. In those days — hard to believe — this was smart humour, was sexy and thrilled. Now it is merely of historical interest only. Worse, there are franchises that...
During an annual board of trustees meeting, one of the trustees dies. Miss Marple thinks he’s been poisoned after finding a chemical on him. She sets off to investigate at the ship where he had just come from. The fourth and final film from the Miss Marple series starring Margaret Rutherford as the quirky amateur detective.
Jerry Lewis’ Mutiny good: well it has a jaunty theme song. At least it honors the original form in that the order we see things in is roughly the order of discovery by the detective. By this entry in the series, they had seriously lost their...
A European prince terrorizes the local peasantry while using his castle as a refuge against the "Red Death" plague that stalks the land.
Reds, Tarot Roger Corman, this was simply another garish, cheaply made horror film, after the model of his previous Vincent Price successes. But for the rest of us, it tipped the world into a strange world of mystical influence. The script is simple enough, merging...
In an industrializing Italian town, a married woman, rendered mentally unstable after a traffic accident, drifts into an affair with a friend of her husband.
Red Sea Parts I see a film and comment on it. If it is one I have seen before, that comment has folds from my life and internal imagination. Every film I have seen builds that imagination in some way. A few are profound and...
The Judy Garland Show is an American musical variety television series that aired on CBS on Sunday nights during the 1963-1964 television season. Despite a sometimes stormy relationship with Judy Garland, CBS had found success with several television specials featuring the star. Garland, who for years had been reluctant to commit to a weekly series, saw the show as her best chance to pull herself out of severe financial difficulties. Production difficulties beset the series almost from the beginning. The series had three different producers in the course of its 26 episodes and went through a number of other key personnel changes. With the change in producers also came changes to the show's format, which started as comedy/variety but switched to an almost purely concert format. While Garland herself was popular with critics, the initial variety format and her co-star, Jerry Van Dyke, were not. The show competed with Bonanza, then the fourth most popular program on television, and consistently performed poorly in the ratings. Although fans rallied in an attempt to save the show, CBS cancelled it after a single season. TV Guide included the series in their 2013 list of 60 shows that were "Cancelled Too Soon".
Bet Your Life skill and training are one thing, Encountering someone with these qualities who is willing to commit everything in a performance is yet another thing. Judy had a TeeVee variety show like dozens of others but she was totally unlike any of them....
Guido Anselmi, a film director, finds himself creatively barren at the peak of his career. Urged by his doctors to rest, Anselmi heads for a luxurious resort, but a sorry group gathers—his producer, staff, actors, wife, mistress, and relatives—each one begging him to get on with the show. In retreat from their dependency, he fantasizes about past women and dreams of his childhood.
The Petaled Swirl of Influences am generally not a fan of Fellini: his early work is too sentimentally trivial for his talent, and his later work is just lazy. But in this film, he reaches more than one height. In terms of basic worlds, it is...