Some Came Running

Ahem

A comment in some post below—I'm trying to get out of the house, so I'm disinclined to make the effort to be more specific—infers that since I haven't posted in a while, the blog may be defunct. It is not, especially given I just re-upped my fee to keep posting for another year. But yeah, it has been dormant. I've been busy. Don't make me quote Team America: World Police again. And it's likely I WILL give it up before the decade's out. I'm thinking, though, maybe give it two more years, quit it in 2018, when it turns ten. That'll be symmetrical and shit.

There is material in the works for this "blog" "spot." I've been watching a lot of Blu-ray discs that I'm not reviewing for anyone else, and you know what that means. But that won't post until after at least one of the British Blu-rays of Tarkovsky stuff comes out.  If you are looking for fresh content from me right this very minute, why not check out my New York Times review of X-Men: Apocalypse? That's pretty funny. Also, if you are near a finer newsstand, Film Comment has published, in its May/June issue, an essay I wrote on Richard Quine's Strangers When We Meet. You have to get the print issue to read it, though, because, shucks,  it's not on the magazine's website.

The renowned website RogerEbert.com continues to run my stuff; this week there are reviews of Chevalier and Presenting Princess Shaw, and an interview with the founder of the new label/streaming service The Film Detective. 

And here is a screen capture from Ski Party, featuring Deborah Walley, Yvonne Craig, and James Brown, with three Flames and some dorky white people in the background. 

The comments section is open. Don't you all fill it up at once. 

Return of the Foo Foo Film Site

As one can't make a living running a semi-depressive, nostalgic, grieving blog, at least that I know of, I now direct you to some Professional Film Writing, not deliberately pitched to expend whatever good will I've accrued by being depressed and nostalgic but just...well, how's the saying go, once more into the breach, with a piece for RogerEbert.com about a new wrinkle in the Saga Of Woody Allen's Critical Reputation. What do YOU think should be done? 

In other news, the other night, entirely of my own volition and with no clue as to why, I sat down and watched a Blu-ray of Live And Let Die about halfway through. I don't want to sound glib but I wonder if I've gone mad with grief or something. 

Watching the detectives, and other housekeeping notes

I've neglected to mention in this spot that I'm hosting another film series at the central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, this one a study of the cinematic private eye, entitled "Detectives: Good, Bad and Ugly," and tonight I'll be introducing Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep at 6:30. Next Wednesday I'll bring in another Marlowe, an underrated one by my lights, Dick Powell in Murder My Sweet. As the series continues we'll take in both Hank Quinlan and Inspector Clouseau. Come by; the library has a recently updated DVD projection system, so it'll look good, and there'll be hopefully lively words before and after. 

Over at RogerEbert.com, I've got examinations of the works of two very different filmmakers, on account of some new DVD box sets of their career highlights: first, vintage-footage orchestrator Bill Morrison, and then, the delirious animation and perversion maestro Walerian Borowczyk. Check em out, as Joe Bob Briggs used to say. 

Lit

I wrote a piece for Gawker, which went up yesterday, about long, ostensibly difficult works of fiction in my recent personal experience, tying it in to a contemporary cultural debate that I find kind of besides any real point even though the majority of my sympathies might be said to fall on the "highbrow" side of it. The response has been gratifyingly positive; even the comments, which can get pretty brutal on the site, have been relatively civil if not always laudatory. One person saw fit to note there were a lot of white males on the reading list I recounted. This was funny, in its implication that I was somehow obliged to meet some kind of diversity quota on my own time (as a reader of the piece will note, I recounted books that I read incidentally, as it were; I wasn't thinking of writing about them at the point of reading them). There is a possible point, or two possible points, embedded in that slice of snark. It's in fact true that I took a preemptive action against that comment by mentioning the possibility that I might next turn to Marguerite Young's Miss Mackintosh, My Darling, next. But there's a larger point concerning the presumption that white males have something of a monopoly on the long and/or "difficult' "literary" novel.

Well, as any reader of Samuel R. Delaney's Dhalgren can tell you (and I'm one), that's of course not the case. And I would have liked to have worked into my piece at least a mention of the admiring name-check Thomas Pynchon gives Ishmael Reed in Gravity's Rainbow (page 598 in the "Penguin Great Books Of The 20th Century" paperback edition), but that really wasn't germane to the matter at hand. And I was weirdly reminded of my admittedly pissy protestations a few years back considering Katie Roiphe's own observations that certain kinds of "big" novels were just something that women didn't do. 

I also published something this week about a white male epic in a different medium, Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America.

Return of the crank

Over at RogerEbert.com, I muse, darkly, on the ostensible subject of "Art, Freedom, and the Bechdel Test." It's the sort of thing I would normally put up here, but as my editors there have told me that they're eager to let me fly my freak flag in their yard, I figured I'd take 'em up on it. Enjoy, and comment there, or here.  

Extremely Important Blu-ray Announcement

I've not made it a secret that it would please me no end to place my Blu-ray Consumer Guide in an online venue that would give the thing more exposure and also pay for the work. And as of today, I have. The November Guide went up today at RogerEbert.com. I hope it entertains a new audience but also that it pleases the readers of this blog, who have been so supportive of it and its sporadic scheduling and all that.

I hope to keep the feature pretty much as it has been here: freewheeling, reliable, idiosyncratic, and, hopefully, trustworthy. There won't be any swearing though, as that's against the house style there. Also I won't be reviewing any porn, '70s or not. At least I don't think so. Please check it out here, and let me know what you think, either there or below. Thanks. 

The overdue current cinema

Been kind of crushed with both work and panic over work, so I've neglected to post links to my latest reviews at RogerEbert.com. Here they are, of How I Live Now and Dallas Buyers Club. 

As for the work, I'll keep you posted on those things that are actually relevant to My Higher Calling As A Film Critic, and maybe a couple of things that aren't. And I'll soon weigh in here on a Particular Aspect At Least, of...wait for it...The Counselor.

"Hello," I love you

Sorry for the light posting lately. Aside from the usual, whatever the usual is, I've been having some irksome computer issues. Send money. (Just kidding. But seriously: send money.) No, anyway, there's a really first-rate picture opening a little bit this Friday, Todd Louiso's Hello, I Must Be Going, featuring a spectacular performance from the luminous and acute Melanie Lynskey. More in my review for MSN Movies. 

In other movie news, The Words fail, ar ar ar. This is in a sense a fascinating not-good movie with respect to a kind of willful blindness and romanticization pertaining to writers and writing and texts, and maybe when I can think a little straighter I'll get into it more here. 

A girl and a gun or maybe a grapefruit

From William Wellman's The Public Enemy, which is one of the Fifty Great Gangster Movies I chose for a gallery at MSN Movies. Apologies for the navigation and loading issues, as ever. 

The gallery's peg, or one of them, is John Hillcoat's Lawless, a bootlegging actioner that doesn't entirely transcend its Shia LaBeouf Problem but still provides a decent amount of bang, as I argue in my review.

"The Cinephiliacs" and me

My friend Peter Labuza, proprietor of the site LabuzaMovies, has started a new venture, a podcast series, which is what all the kids are into nowadays. It's called The Cinephiliacs, and when Peter first pitched me on it he said he aspired to make it an equivalent of Marc Maron's "WTF" for film lovers. And speaking of WTF, Peter asked me to be his first guest. Seriously, though, it was an honor, and a fascinating and not labor-unintensive experience. We cover quite a bit of ground and I get quite a bit off of my chest—I don't recall if I cried or not, I might have—and while I'm gonna take a little break from myself before I listen to it, you don't have to. Go here for the whole story, and enjoy. I hope. If you do, tell your friends.