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Born as a commoner in a land of royalty, one person in the San Fernando Valley…

Yes, I know that by the time this posts Christmas will be done and gone and we will be looking forward to New Years, but I cannot stop before posting my two all-time fave versions of the story, the Scrooges of Albert Finney, and the great and glorious Alistair Sim (and after all Christmas really does last until January 6th so…

This month, it was heartening and humbling to see so many committed people come out to watch Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15 hour Berlin Alexanderplatz , Ingmar Bergman’s 5 hour and 20 minute full television version of Fanny and Alexander , and Kyrzstof Kieslowski’s 10 hour The Decalogue.

These television works, by world famous directors obsess me. The longer television form allows for a kind of exploration, expression, experimentation that can yield some of the most mysterious and intriguing fruits.

I’ve always had an informal rule…

This is another of the nice short versions, originally broadcast on Shower of Stars, with Fredric March as Scrooge (only 57 years old, aging himself up quite a bit, and with an enormous honker), and Basil Rathbone as Marley. It is a musical version, with a score by Bernard Herrmann, so we’ll find out if it has a song in the fabled “Belle tells Ebenezer he worships another idol, a golden one,” part of the story.

It starts with…

There’s a certain kind of melodrama frequently associated with (and often attributed to) the 1950s films of Douglas Sirk – family-based dramas with plots driven more by the internal forces of the characters’ heightened emotions rather than narrative twists. That’s a very shorthand and, admittedly, reductive version of a description of his general approach. He also didn’t shy away from taking on potentially prickly social issues within the films’ stories, highlighting alcoholism and impotence in Written on the Wind or racism in Imitation of Life.

At the dawn of the next decade…

This week, we screened Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1988, West Germany) as part of our final month of 2021 programming.

Watching the movie, prepping for it, sitting in the seat, transported me back to when I was a teenager discovering world cinema for the first time.

It’s a very specific feeling those first…

“Since I died I’ve been given no rest. I’ve been forced to watch the whores of this world. I whores I’m responsible for.”

(I’m pretty sure he was saying horrors, but that’s not what it sounded like!)

Hoo doggies, this next one is rough.

A Christmas Carol (2019) is a modern…

So, watching and writing about twelve Halloween movies in October not being challenging enough, I have decided to watch as many versions of A Christmas Carol as I can this month, because I am crazy.

Also because I truly love A Christmas Carol. I grew up with a record album where the story was read by Sir Ralph Richardson that I listened to a thousand times before I ever saw a filmed version, and then I became obsessed with them. Weirdly, though, there are some very famous versions that I have never seen, and now is the time to rectify that terrible error.

They can be…

Oscar winning director William Friedkin once remarked that, “The MGM musical is the spine of the American film.” This quote might be a surprise at first, since these were films that were often regarded as light fluff, but Friedkin couldn’t be closer to the truth. These were films of master craftsmanship, and style, that never failed to charm audiences, or influence future filmmakers. Many point to Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) as the beginning of the era, and Gigi (1958) as the end point, but the beginning of the peak was right in the heart of these two films which was An American in Paris, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary this month.

The film was…