When Hilary Swank won an Academy Award for her extraordinary performance in Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999), it guaranteed that the film would reach a much wider and more mainstream audience despite its controversial subject matter. The film’s commercialRead More
As a teacher of screenwriting I’m always amazed that in the scripts of my students, after setting up dramatic conflicts between characters, characters will often suddenly and abruptly reach a “new understanding,” defusing whatever dramatic tension the script has beenRead More
It is sometimes hard to remember that there was a time when Bosley Crowther routinely used to attack any novel or daring new film release, such as Cassavetes’ Shadows, or that Hilton Kramer had the final say about what passedRead More
Last week a number of folks on the “filmies” listserv tried to goad me into uploading my early films on YouTube as a way of gaining additional visibility. Karina Longworth at SpoutBlog only yesterday wrote: “Right now, YouTube is the closestRead More
When I was in college, I was already familiar with the major Bergman films – The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence – through various film society screenings. I spentRead More
Before I had my own weblog, Mystery Man on Film commented about the brief excerpt from my book that I posted on my Web site: “Then the chapter went on to talk about how Gus Van Sant threw out theRead More
Jerry Saltz, the New York Magazine art critic, whose columns also appear on artnet, apparently boycotted the openings of Documenta and Venice this year. In his most recent column he suggests that these large international exhibitions are “outmoded,” arguing thatRead More
The confluence of the Venice Biennale and Documenta – the two largest and most important international art exhibitions in the world – occurs only every ten years, making it possible to compare the two major simultaneously-held events. Having attended FrancescoRead More