#55 — Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952) When Adolph Green and Betty Comden wrote the script for Singin’ in the Rain, an MGM musical conceived as little more than a vehicle … Continue reading Greatish Performances #55
#6 — Singin’ in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952) A few years back, when the American Film Institute followed their surprisingly successful AFI’S 100 Years 100 Movies special with annual companion lists of increasing insignificance (anybody really care … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Six
Flow: For Love of Water (Irena Salina, 2008). Because there are few things we enjoy in our house than watching documentaries that offer an assessment, in painful detail, of how humanity is engaged in self-inflicted extinction through carelessly destructive exploitation of one of the most necessary substances for human existence. It make for a fun night of movie-watching. Real popcorn fare. Irene Salina’s film is compelling and suitably frightening, although it occasionally tangles itself up because there’s simply so much ground to cover. As admirably as it presents the scope of the problem, there are definitely times when it seems … Continue reading Donen and Kelly, Frankenheimer, Salina, Skolimowski, Téchiné
I didn’t have that many writing assignments for Spectrum Culture this week, so of course I needed to make certain my one piece was exceedingly long, maybe the longest I’ve ever written for the site. To be fair, the “Re-make/Re-model” series invites length given that at least two films need to be broken down. In writing about Jonathan Demme’s remake of a Stanley Donen classic, I also had the opportunity to reference an old Onion article for which I have a special fondness. I also offered up a far briefer contribution to this week’s List Inconsequential list about great live … Continue reading Spectrum Check
Two for the Road (Stanley Donen, 1967). This comic drama about the evolution of a marriage, with particular focus on the sharp degradation it experiences, is playful with its chronology in a way that must have been completely novel at the time of the film’s release. Now, it’s a more familiar cinematic approach, which doesn’t make Two for the Road terribly ineffective, though it does undercut some of the sillier moments that were presumably inserted to make the film easier to grasp a hold of for perplexed audiences. Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney are both terrific as they play the … Continue reading Bernhardt, Bicquet, Donen, Huston, Pakula
Coffee for Two 