Rocky, Raging Bull, Cinderella Man, Million Dollar Baby: I’m not so crazy about boxing, but I love boxing movies, David O. Russell‘s The Fighter is one of the best, because, like the other great ones, it’s less about the pugilism than it is about the people. The fighter of the title is the promising but …
Ginny and I had the pleasure yesterday of going to the Jacob Burns Center and not only seeing The Way Back, the new film by Peter Weir, but also hearing the great Weir talk about the movie in an interview with Janet Maslin. The Way Back is a fictionalized version of The Long Walk, Slavomir …
One of the hardest things to do is to explain to a young person what it was like when something that has become established and famous was brand new. This clip of Mel Brooks appearing on The Dick Cavett Show offers a small bit of what it was like when he was first rolling out …
It’s hard to beat David Thomson as a writer or as a film critic, but Mr. Nice he is not. Thomson can often be quite mean about Hollywood stars, and as The Hollywood Reporter disclosed this weekend, he uses the latest edition of his New Biographical Dictionary of Film to chop some new meat. Here …
After reading Michael Perino‘s The Hellhound of Wall Street, I was wondering if we would ever see the likes of a Ferdinand Pecora who would explicate the figures and practices behind the financial crisis of 2008 as well as Pecora, the Manhattan prosecutor, did during the Depression for the Crash of 1929. Well, opportunities for …
Paul Newman, Natasha Richardson and Lauren Bacall, enroute to a party for Talk magazine, August 1999. Photograph by Daffyd Jones. Found on Jeff Wells‘s site Hollywood Elsewhere.
We went to see the film Secretariat yesterday. It was a fairly standard sports story, full of the usual sports story pleasures–a plucky lead character, colorful supporting characters, beautiful pictures of competition. Diane Lane and James Cromwell had some swell scenes involving business dealings. The big let down for me came when they showed Secretariat …
Allow me to join the chorus praising The Social Network, the new film directed by David Fincher from Aaron Sorkin‘s exceptional screenplay, loosely based on the creation of Facebook. I’m not sure if Mark Zuckerberg is exactly like the character depicted on screen, but as he has been written, and as he has been portrayed …