Check this out....
* This dude Gerry Canavan was writing about "the motivations for apocalyptic fantasy..."
when he was... “Struck by the recurrence of a ruined Statue of Liberty as perhaps the quintessential icon of disaster since the 1940s. So struck, in fact, that I began to obsessively collect these images from the 'net wherever I could find them. Submitted for your approval, the fruits of my labor”
He has compiled an amazing collection of doomed Statue Of Liberty pics and scenes from movies, books, comic etc. It's great, a lotta fun.
* Screen Grab has a cute little piece, about the freak, one time superstar director: Vanishing Act: Michael Cimino It's slight and they don't even mention the great Vanity Fair article on Cimino from March 2002.
I searched on line, but I couldn’t find a copy of it.
However Vanity Fair is currently posting on line for all to read, Peter Biskind's awesome piece...
Thunder on the Left: The Making of Reds On the box-office coattails of 1978's Heaven Can Wait, Warren Beatty seized his chance to defy Hollywood wisdom by making Reds, a big-budget docudrama sympathetic to the Russian Revolution. The star-director-producer's creative obsession, from the volatile scriptwriting wars to the relentless retakes that reduced Jack Nicholson nearly to tears and helped send Beatty's romance with Diane Keaton into meltdown, resulted in a stunning epic about American Communists.
* My friends, now here is a great website...
Observations on film art and Film Art by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell
They always are loaded fascinating, epic articles on film.
This recent piece about Cloverfield is good one.
A behemoth from the Dead Zone “I enjoyed Cloverfield. It starts with a sharp premise, but as ever, execution is everything. I see it as a nifty digital update of some classic Hollywood conventions”
* Yuck. In a gushy Wall Street Journal article about the hit-or-miss director, this geeky critic Joe Morgenstern asks about Sydney Pollack:
“how did he come, most recently, to do one of the best documentaries ever made about an artist, ‘Sketches of Frank Gehry,’ when he is not essentially -- and was not previously -- a documentary director? The answers flow from the essence of the man”.
I thought "what the hell is he talking about ‘best documentaries ever made’?
Hey man, of the documentaries of just that year 2005, it wasn’t even one of the ten best. Off the top of my head, I like these much more.... The Boys of Baraka (Ewing, Grady), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Gibney), Home of the Brave (di Florio), Inside Deep Throat (Bailey, Barbato), March of the Penguins (Jacquet), Murderball (Rubin, Shapiro), No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (Scorsese), The Staircase (de Lestrade), Tarnation (Caouett), Unforgivable Blackness (Burns) and The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (Irving).
And I’m not even a Grizzly Man (Herzog) fan.
* A really good site Hollywood Bitchslap. Keeps track of lame film critics, weekly publishing pieces making fun of them.
Here's their year end Criticwatch 2007 - The Whores of the Year
It's very funny and very insightful.
* Another E Mag with lots of rich film articles is Bright Lights Film Journal
Their DVD section always introduces me to new titles.
The latest issue has some nice pieces including...
Jason Mark Scott's The Lady from Shanghai: Welles bids farewell to Hayworth and Hollywood
David L. Pike writes a lengthy piece A Boy and His Dog: On Will Smith, Apocalypse, and I Am Legend
Even though I was deeply disappointed with Grindhouse and especially Tarantino's overlong, full of it’s self Death Proof, I still cant’ get enough reading about it. Revisiting it, Erich Kuersten writes The Foxy, the Dead, and the Foxier.
He convinced me to give it another look, some time
* Also, though not on the internet, the great film nerd mag Video Watchdog’s current newsstand issue has it’s own round table discussion on the whole Grindhouse experience. Some of their past round tables discussions are however available to read on line. The 1970s HORROR REVIVAL chat is a blast
* Hey, Video Watchdog is all over this years RONDO HATTON CLASSIC HORROR AWARDS
Lots of good stuff listed on that.
Gee whiz maybe next year Rocket Blog will be getting lots a trophies (can you imagine all the chicks a dude writing for an award winning web site could get? Oh boy, it's gonna be a good year!)
-sweeneyrules
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