Alissa Wilkinson

The Maid

A few thoughts and remainders after seeing La nana (The Maid).

Adam Falkner

Cool

In this poem by Adam Falkner, an awkward teenager endlessly practices his Michael Jackson dance moves.

Ron Reed

Made For TV: Filmwell's Resident Telephobe Launches New Series

I have a deep and abiding aversion to the noxious stuff that streams into our homes every day, gushing through cables and flooding into living rooms, family rooms, bedrooms. Trance-inducing, rigidly structured around sales pitches. Story arcs that never land, like endless transcontinental flights that only pretend to have a destination, suspended mid-air by continual complications – whether mundane or melodramatic – until such time as certain contracts fail to be renewed and the exhausted shell of a thing comes crashing to the ground at last. . . .

Mike Hertenstein

Facets' Milos Stehlik on "U.S. Imperialism Through Film"

“Is American cinema imperialist?  In a word, YES,” says Facets Multimedia founder Milos Stehnlik in his regular commentary this week for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview program. Over-simplified characters and cartoonish plot-resolution lead to an eye-for-an-eye philosophy where conflict is resolved by the gratuitous use of excessive force. In the tried and true good-guy versus bad-guy […]

Mike Hertenstein

Speaking Ill of The Dead

It’s easy to see why John Huston wanted so badly to make a film of this story, and why he treated it as sacred text. Another filmmaker who seemed to treat his sports car as sacred and not much else, Roberto Rossellini, gleefully pilfered The Dead and wove it into a film which, unlike Huston’s, translates Joyce’s epiphanous power into cinema.

M.S. Smith

Cinema and Los Angeles

As the fall winds along, and the summer recedes into the past, the furor over the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s embattled film program gradually diminishes.  And, yet, the museum, which is the largest of its kind west of the Mississippi River, and which has had a vibrant film program for more than forty […]

Alissa Wilkinson

Netflix Prepares for the Future

On Twitter, Anne Thompson pointed to an L.A. Times article about Netflix preparing for possible new restrictions by studios that keep rental outlets from being able to rent new DVD releases until several weeks after they go on sale. The studios, of course, hope to boost DVD sales. But Netflix is okay with this: While […]