Mae West on Criterion

by Cláudio Alves

When she's good, she's very good. When she's bad, she's better. 

Mae West was one of the great stars of the Pre-Code era, though her reign as one of Hollywood's most popular queens was short-lived and curtailed by the advent of the Hays Code. Like Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz after her, West was a target of William Randolph Hearst's ire. According to legend, the millionaire wanted revenge on West after she had made insulting remarks concerning the acting abilities of Marion Davies, his mistress. Such conspiracies are fun and it's easy to paint Hearst as Old Hollywood's perennial villain, but they're rarely 100% true. Mae West's fall from grace is more complicated than a vendetta from a mogul and a bunch of outraged Catholics. She was one of a kind, a symbol of licentiousness and indecency, a provocateur whose triumph was as amazing as it was temporary... 

Click to read more ...

The Astronaut Dramas of the 2010s

by Juan Carlos Ojano

Two-time Oscar winner Goerge Clooney directs and stars in Netflix’s final awards contender to drop to streaming during this calendar year, the science fiction drama The Midnight Sky. Based on a novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton, the film follows a lone scientist (Clooney) in the Arctic who must contact a group of astronauts to stop them from returning to earth. This is Clooney’s first film as an actor since 2016’s Money Monster and his first as a director since 2017’s Suburbicon. The film will join a curiously large cinematic trend of 2010s Hollywood: the astronaut drama...

Click to read more ...

What Qualifies as a Comedy for the Golden Globes?

By Abe Friedtanzer

It was announced this week that the forthcoming Promising Young Woman (my favorite film of 2020)  will be campaigned at the Golden Globes in the comedy/musical races. There’s definitely a case to be made for its classification as a comedy, even though it’s very dark. I agree that it’s the right choice though surely some will argue. Similarly, The Flight Attendant, which just earned a season two renewal from HBO Max, is likely to be considered a comedy for the TV categories, an interesting choice given the fact that it’s really a thriller. This isn’t the first time there’s at least been room for debate about what actually counts as a comedy with the HFPA and other groups…

Click to read more ...

Showbiz History: The Children's Hour, Little Shop, and a Gyllenhalic holiday

6 random things that happened on this day, December 19th, in showbiz history...

1915 Edith Giovanna Gassion born in Paris and immediately abandoned by her mother. She would be raised by prostitutes and would become the famous songbird Edith Piaf, her last name slang for "sparrow", and eventually an international icon. Her life was dramatized (in excruciatingly non-linear fashion as was the fad in the mid Aughts) in 2007's La Vie En Rose which won Marion Cotillard the Best Actress Oscar. Like her contemporary Judy Garland she would struggle with addiction and die at age 47 years in the 1960s. 

1961 The now infamous drama The Children's Hour opens in theaters on its way to 5 Oscar nominations...

Click to read more ...

Welles beyond Kane

by Cláudio Alves

With David Fincher's Mank on Netflix, many have been talking about Citizen Kane. The writing of Orson Welles' putative first feature (technically, though unfinished, Too Much Johnson precedes it by three years) is central to the new movie, but the narrative is far more interested in the 1934 California gubernatorial election than in the shooting of Kane. We never see cameras rolling on that which has been, at one point, considered the best movie ever made. Whether you agree with that hyperbolic title or not, it's undeniable that it's one of the most written about works ever produced by Hollywood, with essays such as Pauline Kael's Raising Kane enshrining the picture in prestige and controversy.

While I admire Citizen Kane and find it a masterpiece, I must admit to being far more fascinated by Welles' later efforts. Through exiles and a myriad of unfinished experiments, Orson Welles' filmography extends well beyond Kane…

Click to read more ...