USA

Paul Newman made his directorial debut and Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward, stars as Rachel Cameron, a 35-year-old unmarried schoolteacher who feels as though she’s wasted her life. Rachel’s best friend, Calla Mackie (Estelle Parsons), invites her to attend a religious revival meeting. Here Rachel is swept up in the emotional fervor orchestrated by a young guest preacher (Terry Kiser). This is the first of several cathartic incidents which convince Rachel to kick over the traces and express her own needs and emotions. She has a brief sexual liaison with an old family friend (James Olson), and is delighted at the notion that she might have become pregnant. Rachel ends up alone and childless (her “pregnancy” was nothing more than a benign cyst), but still determined to forge a new life for herself. Based the novel A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence, Rachel, Rachel won New York Film Critics awards for both Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, and an Oscar nomination for Joanne Woodward.Read More »

Although he has been limited to bit parts, actor Tony Longo is an axiom of American action cinema: the giant who is too softhearted for the job. Composed of three short movies, “Hey, Asshole!,” “Adam Kesher” and “You Fucking Dickhead!,” The Tony Longo Trilogy brings together all of the actor’s scenes in three of his most memorable films: “The Takeover” (Troy Cook, 1995), “Living in Peril” (Jack Ersgard, 1997) and “Mulholland Dr.” (David Lynch, 2001).
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“Network” will shake you up. Paddy Chayefsky’s absurdly plausible and outrageously provocative original script concerns media running amok. Faye Dunaway and William Holden, each in two of their finest performances, plus Peter Finch and Robert Duvall star in this superbly cast and handsomely produced Howard Gottfried production. Sidney Lumet’s direction is outstanding. The Metro picture, released by United Artists, is a potent commercial blend of artful tirade, visual excitement and sociological horror.

In terms of older films about the broadcast media, this is no soap opera film, like MGM’s long-ago “The Hucksters.” Nor is it low-key, intellectual drama like “A Face In the Crowd.” This is a bawdy, stops-out, no-holds-barred story of a TV network that will, quite literally, do anything to get an audience. The strangest thing about the film is that, while often preachy, hysterical, shrill and bizarre, it also makes a compelling statement from amidst its sound and fury. It’s a verbal and visual equivalent of a dozen top-40 radio stations blaring out at you in the same room. In short, it’s just mad.Read More »

Apache was based on Paul I. Wellman’s novel Broncho Apache, which in turn was inspired by a true story. Burt Lancaster plays Massai, a lieutenant of the great Apache warrior Geronimo (here depicted as an old man, played by Monte Blue). Though his tribe has signed surrender terms with the conquering whites, Massai refuses to do so. He escapes from a prison train and conducts a one-man war against the white intruders-and against some of his own people. Along the way, he claims Nalinle (Jean Peters), whom he previously regarded as a traitor to his cause, as his wife. John McIntire plays famed Indian scout Al Sieber, who-in this film, if not in real life-is sympathetic to the Indians’ plight and Massai’s single-purposed cause. The real-life counterpart to Massai was killed by Sieber’s minions after agreeing to call off the hostilies; United Artists objected to this, forcing producer/star Burt Lancaster to shoot an unconvincingly happy ending.
Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

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Switch is a faint-hearted sex comedy that doesn’t have the courage of its initially provocative convictions. Undemanding audiences will get a few laughs from the notion of a man parading around in Ellen Barkin’s body. Ladykiller Steve Brooks (Perry King) accepts an invitation for a hot tub frolic with three of his old girlfriends, only to be murdered by them for his innumerable emotional crimes against women over the years. Steve is given a chance to escape a fiery fate by returning to Earth and finding just one woman who genuinely likes him. Only catch is that he will henceforth inhabit the body of a woman, and that of an uncommonly sexy one.Read More »

Plot: Chu Chu Ramirez is a Mexican farm laborer in California, with lofty ideals, who is very proud of his new American citizenship. During his time off, he tries to befriend the alcoholic bar girl Nancy. After working for a month for the subsistence farmer Mr. Ames and his frustrated wife, Chu Chu discovers that his paycheck bounces and Ames stalls in paying him. Just after a confrontation between Ames and Chu Chu, Ames is accidentally wounded by his own shotgun and he and his wife blame it on Chu Chu. Despite the support of his friends and sympathetic sheriff, Chu Chu is given a year’s sentence. Written by Will GilbertRead More »

This is the Coens short for Chacun son cinéma that got left out of the DVD. Llewelyn Moss/Dan goes to the movies and the only things playing are Climates and The Rules of the Game 🙂Read More »

“With her Oscar-winning turn in Klute, Jane Fonda reinvented herself as a new kind of movie star. Bringing nervy audacity and counterculture style to the role of Bree Daniels—a call girl and aspiring actor who becomes the focal point of a missing-person investigation when detective John Klute (Donald Sutherland) turns up at her door—Fonda made the film her own, putting an independent woman and escort on-screen with a frankness that had not yet been attempted in Hollywood. Suffused with paranoia by the conspiracy-thriller specialist Alan J. Pakula, and lensed by master cinematographer Gordon Willis, Klute is a character study thick with dread, capturing the mood of early-1970s New York and the predicament of a woman trying to find her own way on the fringes of society.”Read More »

Series: Philosophy Of Popular Culture
Ebook: 492 pages
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky (December 4, 2014)
Language: English
eISBN: 978-0-8131-4512-9

Wars have played a momentous role in shaping the course of human history. The ever-present specter of conflict has made it an enduring topic of interest in popular culture, and many movies, from Hollywood blockbusters to independent films, have sought to show the complexities and horrors of war on-screen.Read More »