The Furniture: Social Distancing with Safe

"The Furniture" is our series on Production Design by Daniel Walber. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Safe turns 25 years old this week. I’d say it’s “more relevant than ever,” but just typing those words felt ridiculous. Todd Haynes made Safe about the way America responded to AIDS, and that’s still relevant because America has not changed. And so here we are, in another crisis of public health, watching the same phenomena play out in similar ways.

Let's talk about two of them. First, the way that AIDS was ignored by those who saw themselves as unaffected, even immune. Reagan could choose to do nothing because, to so many Americans, it happened to “other people.” Second, the way that its victims were blamed for their own sickness. Contracting HIV was seen as the result of a moral failure - something we’ve seen time and again, from cholera and tuberculosis to SARS and COVID-19.

25 years later, another Republican president is playing the same game. The response has been a torrent of virulent racism and an utter denial of medical reality. And once again, there is a prevailing attitude that contracting the virus is one’s own fault.

Did rewatching Safe make me feel better about any of this? Absolutely not. But it did cause me to think about a new relevance...

Click to read more ...

The New Classics: The Master

By Michael Cusumano

The Master refuses to elevate the audience above Freddie Quell.  In the simplistic version of the film Joaquin Phoenix’s wastrel Freddie Quell would be The Sucker and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd would be The Fraud and there would be little ambiguity about it. No doubt this version was what many expected when they bought a ticket for Paul Thomas Anderson’s kaleidoscopic spiritual and psychological odyssey. A dynamic that would allow for them to lean back and smugly cluck that they wouldn’t be so easily taken in by such madness.

What Anderson's fictionalized take on the founding of Scientology delivered was something altogether more twisted and obscure. At no point can we be entirely sure what any of the main characters truly believe...

Click to read more ...

Almost There: The cast of "A Raisin in the Sun"

by Cláudio Alves

The 1950s and 60s marked a time when the Academy Awards loved few things more than prestigious stage play adaptations. This was particularly true of the acting categories, where dozens of such movies scored multiple nominations. Comparing the Tony nods with the Oscars' is to find many of the same roles, like Tennessee Williams' heroines, Eugene O'Neill's human wrecks, Clifford Odet's tragic characters, and Edward Albee's domestic demons. For a short period, the Tonys were even better precursors for an Oscar victory than the Golden Globes. Still, even these trends have exceptions and one of the saddest was the 1961 movie based on Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun…

Click to read more ...

Joel Schumacher (1939-2020)

by Nathaniel R

Joel Schumacher and the star he made, Colin FarrellI once walked across the street in the East Village with Joel Schumacher. I didn't say anything though I immediately recognized him; as directors go he was hard to miss -- very tall with long silver hair. Anything I might have wanted to say would surely have been too belabored in a street crossing. "I love your work," is rote and in this case untrue though I loved some of his work enthusiastically in a formative (St Elmo's Fire) or camp (Batman & Robin) or moment-in-time (Flatliners, Tigerland).

Sometimes I loved his work in all of those ways at once -- Love you, Lost Boys!

It's been curious to see so much appreciation spring up on the internet today, particularly because Schumacher was never a director to inspire reverence in the masses though he made several popular pictures...

Click to read more ...

200 Oldest Living Screen Stars

We thought it was time to update this list..

200 OLDEST LIVING SCREEN STARS
last updated 06/10/2021

103 years old

Marsha Hunt (10/17/17)
This Chicago born actress made over 50 films but never achieved A list stardom (during her peak she was often just below the title) and was one of many victims of the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s. Among her best known films: the Greer Garson version of Pride & Prejudice (she played Mary Bennett), the comedy Bride by Mistake, the family dramedy The Human Comedy (which gave Mickey Rooney a historic nomination), and the well-loved noir Raw Deal.

101 years old

Nehemiah Persoff (8/2/19)
Modern audiences probably remember him best as the loving Papa whose ears Yentl kept checking in song in Barbra Streisand's hit musical. But that was just scratching the surface of his career as he had numerous tv and film roles for decades including the voice of Papa Mousekwitz in the An American Tail movies. At the peak of his career in the 1950s he was in films like Hitchcock's The Wrong Man and the immortal comedy Some Like It Hot...  

Click to read more ...