These posts celebrate the movie trailers, movie posters, commercials, print ads, and other promotional material that stand as their own works of art. Back when I was part of a crew that had an endless capacity for discussing all manner … Continue reading The Art of the Sell: “Fearless” trailer
#29 — Witness (Peter Weir, 1985) There’s something unique about the sedate assurance Peter Weir brings to his films, especially when the works in question are at their most bleakly lovely and elegiacal. I remember reading an interview with Weir in which he talked about trying to find an approach where the elements of this film that were potentially most off-putting could be transformed into things of odd beauty. Death in a movie, even a movie that has some elements of mystery and action doesn’t automatically need to be kinetic, sharp. It can have a mesmerizing quality. It can challenge … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 80s — Number Twenty-Nine
The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947). Based on Frederic Wakeman’s novel from the previous year, The Hucksters burrows into the intersection between advertising and media as a sharp-witted, upstanding man returns to the former field after years away. Clark Gable plays Victor Norman, a crafty operator who views his soap company overlord largely with sardonic superiority. The portions of the film that survey the ever-shifting terrain of the radio environment are uniformly strong, thanks in no small part to the boisterously effective performance of Sydney Greenstreet as the corporate bigwig who sets everyone but Gable’s Norman aquiver. The stretches that deal … Continue reading Conway, Garbus, von Sternberg, Weir, Yates
Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962). Vladimir Nabokov’s novel was less than ten years old when Stanley Kubrick took a swing at it, so he was working with a best-selling sensation instead of a revered part of the canon. That–combined with the significant detail that he was Stanley Kubrick and he plainly did want he wanted–gives the director great latitude in his adaptation. Nabokov himself is the credited screenwriter, but much of that material was jettisoned by Kubrick on the way to making his own distinct, darkly comic work. James Mason is marvelous as Professor Humbert Humbert, the man who becomes smitten … Continue reading Altman, Clements and Musker, Gordon (and others), Kubrick, Weir
#40 — The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) For me, part of loving movies has long included gathering and consuming as much information about them as I could possibly find. I’d seek out stories about deals getting pulled together, tracking how the ongoing traffic of writers, directors and actors following the route of their respective careers were leading to fascinating intersections of sensibilities. I tore through feature stories about pending releases, and dutifully read every word of the forecasts of seasonal movie slates that showed up in publications like Premiere and Entertainment Weekly. And I perhaps took the greatest pleasure … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Forty
Coffee for Two 