Alternative Film Guide

 
Today is Barbara Stanwyck Day on Turner Classic Movies.
Above are a couple of Stanwyck homages at the Academy Awards. In the first one, William Holden pays tribute to Stanwyck, his leading lady in his first major film role, Golden Boy (1939). Stanwyck stood by him when Columbia was just about ready to sack the [...]

Summer Under the Stars
Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy
 

Saturday, August 23, highlights on Turner Classic Movies:
There are some who find Laurel & Hardy painfully funny. There are others who find them merely painful. I belong to the latter group.
TCM premieres include Night Owls (1930), Brats (1930), Hog Wild (1930), Be Big! (1931), Laughing Gravy (1931), Our [...]

At Moving Image Source, Chris Fujiwara’s article "Tears Without Laughter" deciphers "audience responses to Douglas Sirk, in the U.S. and Japan," where he attended a 10-film Sirk retrospective in Tokyo. Here are a couple of snippets:
"In the U.S., screenings of Sirk masterpieces such as Written on the Wind (1956), Imitation of Life (1959), and even [...]

Tibor Szakaly, who took part in a Alternative Film Guide q&a about his and William Fiala’s short film Cubicle the Musicle a while back, was recently interviewed on the Starship Troopers 3: Marauder website. Tibor, whom I see every week at French class in Beverly Hills, worked as "miniature cameraman" on the Starship Troopers 3 [...]

Summer Under the Stars
Ava Gardner
 

Thursday, August 21, highlights on Turner Classic Movies:
Sexy or sensual? In all honesty, I don’t know if there’s a difference between the two, but in case there is I’d say that, when it comes to women, Marilyn Monroe and Anita Ekberg would be sexy whereas Catherine Deneuve and Ava Gardner would [...]

 
Tom Murray’s A Portable Tribe, which is being screened today at the Sarasota Film Society’s GLBT Film Festival, is described as a "light-hearted documentary celebrates the lives of Gay men, their bonding, sense of brotherhood and quest to explore non-urban adventures."
Clip posted by tjoemurray.
Official Site
 
Juliane Köhler and Maria Schrader in AIMEE & JAGUAR
MARIUS Clip
Joan [...]

Summer Under the Stars
Edward G. Robinson

Wednesday, August 20, highlights on Turner Classic Movies:
My all-time favorite actor: Edward G. Robinson. Like Barbara Stanwyck, TCM’s Star of August 19, Robinson was just about incapable of delivering a performance lacking in either charisma or honesty. No matter how bad the movie, how small or thankless the role, Robinson [...]

Summer Under the Stars
Barbara Stanwyck
 
Tuesday, August 19, highlights on Turner Classic Movies:
My understanding is that there have been precious few transformations more radical than that of Ruby Stevens of Brooklyn into Barbara Stanwyck of Hollywood — the highest-paid woman in the United States in 1944.
In my view, Barbara Stanwyck is one of the greatest [...]

Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls, a shoo-in for one of the five Best Picture slots in 2006 (a shoo-in that failed to make the cut), will be screened as the next feature in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ "Great To Be Nominated" series on Monday, August 18, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy’s [...]

A week of rock ‘n roll features and documentaries will be presented at the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre in Santa Monica beginning August 28. Among those are Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young: Heart of Gold, Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night, and the Los Angeles premiere of Patti Smith: Dream of Life (above), directed by Steven [...]

Summer Under the Stars
Gene Kelly & Jack Palance
 
Sunday-Monday, August 17–18, highlights on Turner Classic Movies:
Gene Kelly and Jack Palance are two Hollywood creations that couldn’t be more different. Unlike Greer Garson and Peter Lorre, however, they would not make a lovely pair. Jack Palance’s menacing smirk would engulf Gene Kelly’s gee-whiz grin so the duo [...]

Pineapple Express (2008)
Direction: David Gordon Green. Screenplay: Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen; from a story by Goldberg, Rogen, and Judd Apatow. Cast: Seth Rogen, James Franco, Danny McBride, Gary Cole, Rosie Perez, Craig Robinson, Kevin Corrigan
 

 
I saw the newest Apatovian effort, Pineapple Express, at a Just for Laughs Film Festival press screening in Montreal. [...]

Summer Under the Stars: Rita Hayworth & Fred Astaire
 
Friday-Saturday, August 15–16, highlights on Turner Classic Movies:
Since TCM is currently leasing Columbia’s library, this year’s Rita Hayworth Day includes most of the actress’ best films. Gilda (right), of course, is a must for those who’ve never seen it. Although clumsy here and there, Charles Vidor’s romantic [...]

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview writer, director, actress, editor, and designer Anna Biller who, as should be clear, is the definition of auteur. She began producing her plays in 1995. Her first short film, Three Examples of Myself as a Queen, was made in 1994, and was followed by Fairy Ballet in 1998, [...]

In Variety, John Dempsey reports that Warner Bros. has remastered — at a reported "healthy seven figures" — MGM’s Academy Award-nominated Western How the West Was Won (1963), which was originally shot in the three-screen Cinerama format.
The film is composed of five separate segments directed by John Ford ("The Civil War"), Henry Hathaway ("The Rivers," [...]

Summer Under the Stars: Peter Lorre & Greer Garson
 

Wednesday-Thursday, August 13–14, highlights on Turner Classic Movies:
Peter Lorre and Greer Garson. Greer Garson and Peter Lorre. How come no one ever thought of pairing those two? Talk about opposites attracting. In fact, talk about worlds colliding: "Dust on the Third Floor," "The Ladies Who Knew Too [...]

Summer Under the Stars: Kim Novak
 
Tuesday, August 12, highlights on Turner Classic Movies:
Schedule (Pacific Time) and synopses from the TCM website:
I fell in love with Kim Novak when I was about 10 or so, after seeing her in three films on television: Picnic, The Eddy Duchin Story, and — I must have been a pretty [...]

Summer Under the Stars: Richard Widmark
 

 
Monday, August 11, highlights on Turner Classic Movies:
Of the Richard Widmark vehicles that I’ve seen, the best one by far is Samuel Fuller’s crime drama Pickup on South Street, a Cold War tale in which a handful of social outcasts end up saving the day. Widmark is fine as [...]

Summer Under the Stars: Doris Day
 

 
Sunday, August 10, highlights on Turner Classic Movies:
I’m not being facetious. It is Doris Day Day on TCM.
Performers like Doris Day usually turn my stomach. Those Hollywood goody-goody types bother me because they’re phony, dishonest, dumbed-down versions of real human beings; they’re all light and sunshine to the point [...]

Two Wayne Wang double features will be screened on Wednesday/Thursday, August 16–17, at the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre in Santa Monica.
The four features consist of two sneak previews and two "revised versions" of older Wang efforts. The sneak previews are A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, winner of the best film award at the [...]

Ernest Borgnine, the 91-year-old veteran of nearly 200 films and TV shows, will show up at the American Cinematheque’s screening of Marty (1955), for which Borgnine won a best actor Academy Award, and The Catered Affair (1956) on Friday, August 8, at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. The show starts at 7:30 pm.
"Everything is [...]

 
Martin Rubin’s "Jobless Number: Economics and sex in a Depression-era Busby Berkeley musical" at Moving Image Source:
"’Remember My Forgotten Man’ is the simplest and most straightforward of Berkeley’s big numbers in the classic Warner Bros. musicals. Its directness is a consequence of its political commitment. Its points are punched across for maximum impact, most forcefully [...]

The Art Directors Guild Film Society will be screening George Cukor’s extravagant 1960 Western Heller in Pink Tights, starring Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn, in tribute to production designer Gene Allen. The screening will take place on Sunday, August 24 at 5:30 pm at the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre in Santa Monica.
Heller in Pink [...]

Author Allan Ellenberger, currently working on a biography of Miriam Hopkins, pays tribute to Anita Page, The Last Surviving Silent Film Star, who turns 98 today.
Page was one of the stars of the first talking picture to win a Best Picture Academy Award, The Broadway Melody, an MGM musical released in 1929.
Here are a couple [...]

"Sex and the Single Girl: The Escapades of Busby Berkeley" is a mini-retrospective currently being presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood.
Busby Berkeley went from directing stiff military parades to directing spiffy civilian babes in numerous musicals of the 1930s and 1940s, most notably at the [...]