“40 years ago!”
Those are the words said by Major General Clive Candy, the main character in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, and they were uttered by the film’s director Michael Powell 40 years ago when he presented the new restoration 40 years after it was originally released.
Read MoreWhen approaching the 4th of July holiday we often get an excess of jingoism, but what we fail to recognize is the value of immigrants, what they bring to the culture, and how they help retain it as a democracy. The journey of every one of them is unique, and few films explore it better than Elia Kazan’s 1963 film America America, released 60 years ago this year.
Read MoreYet, when I see a movie like Federico Fellini’s 1965 Juliet of the Spirits I can’t help but want to see a resurgence of that kind of mid-twentieth century art-house blockbuster. But with a new twist and new advance for our current times.
Read MoreI’ve had a theory for a long time that German expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Sunrise) is the Ur-ancestor for a whole lineage of a certain kind of filmmaking.
Read MoreIn every culture we know we have to grow up, which means losing the sense of childishness so we can take responsibility and be more considerate and open in our ways of thinking. But what we forget is our sense of childlikeness, which people often conflate with childishness – a sense of wonder, joy, and innocence. Adults forget what it’s like to be a kid, and force the worldly values of alignment, greed, and conformity on adolescence.
Read MoreA light bulb popped on a few months ago. Since then the idea made visible has been the guiding illuminating concept of where I think Secret Movie Club needs to go.
We (the movie industry, movie lovers, movie makers, movie writers, the movie community in all its facets and myriad forms) need to re-vitalize and re-affirm the movie magic feeling.
Read MoreWhen modern audiences think of the western genre from the golden age, they normally conjure up images of righteous heroes, with a simple black and white morality of good guys versus bad guys. What they don’t realize is what a generalization that is, and that there was a time after WWII and the Korean War, that the genre explored the conflict within our culture, and the despair of men who faced atrocity.
Read MoreIt always feels like the start of a backhanded compliment (or worse subtle putdown) to call any movie “minor” in a director’s body of work.
And yet, the minor movies often provide light and perspective on the major movies.
Read MoreHungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr’s 7 1/2 hour 1994 opus Satantango is oft whispered about in the halls of movie lovers as one of the great white whales of cinema watching.
Have you seen it? Do you know about it? What is it actually like to watch it?
Read MoreHitchcock made Saboteur (1942) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943) back to back. He even used the same cinematographer, Joseph Valentine, who would work one more time with Hitch on 1948’s Rope.
The two movies also share a distinction of showing, in snapshot, two sides of Hitchcock’s filmography.
Read MoreHitchcock made Saboteur (1942) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943) back to back. He even used the same cinematographer, Joseph Valentine, who would work one more time with Hitch on 1948’s Rope.
The two movies also share a distinction of showing, in snapshot, two sides of Hitchcock’s filmography.
Read MoreLegendary filmmaker and former film critic Francois Truffaut once said, “I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between; I am not interested in all those films that do not pulse.”
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