Articles in Famous Directors
By Richard von Busack
Sweden’s Tomas Alfredson follows up the best vampire movie of the last few years with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It’s about a different breed of parasites: justifiable (sometimes self-justifiable) as Britain’s last …
By Matt Sills
This Christmas weekend will see six movies get a wide release, each trying to beat the other to a pulp at the box office. Big time directors like David Fincher and Cameron Crowe …
(above: Charles Bronson in the tv show Man With A Camera; episode “Second Avenue Assassin” plays Oct 6 in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater.)
Old-media magnate and maniac Johnny Legend—archivist, wrestling promoter and rockabilly bastard—is …
This month marks the 30th anniversary of MTV, the channel formerly known as Music Television. While it’s now mostly known for teen moms and Jersey sleazeballs, the channel started by playing nothing but music videos. …
Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes concerns the Hubbard clan, a ruthless, upwardly mobile family who play out their drama against a backdrop of the South in transition. Crushed by the terrors of reconstruction, the romanticism …
Monkey Business is a comedy about rejuvenation, a serious theme; however, director Howard Hawks’s treatment of the subject does not emphasize this seriousness. His approach is to make the situations resulting from the premise as …
Originally branded “a dirty fairy tale,” Billy Wilder’s The Apartment combines irony, burlesque, soap opera, and truth into a morality play whose message is “be a mensch,” a Yiddish term for a human being. Filmed …
Comedy in any medium depends a great deal upon the mixing up of messages, the deliberate switching of a communication context, and the swapping of labels on statements. Billy Wilder’s comedies generally avoid slapstick switches …
Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot is an outrageous, satirical spoof of the 1920′s in which Wilder deftly spends two hours milking one joke, that of two musicians on the run from Chicago mobsters, who …
The witness for the prosecution, a surprise witness, is Christine Vole (Marlene Dietrich), presumably the wife of the man on trial for murder, Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), a ne’er-do-well gadget peddler. She claims that she …
