Culture Notes: Whit Bissell Centenary

The centenary celebrations for Whit Bissell are winding down by now; you’re probably tired of hearing the endless tributes and thinkpieces paying tribute to the actor, born October 25, 1909. Of course I’m kidding: nobody pays elaborate, passionate tribute to Whit Bissell, and if people know his name it’s because of its humorous quality, an internal [...]

Culture Notes: Movietone News Revival

The Parallax View website has taken on a mighty, and mightily welcome, project: the online posting of the contents of Movietone News, one of the “little film magazines” that lived in the 1970s. Published by the Seattle Film Society under the editorship of Richard T. Jameson, future editor of Film Comment, the magazine appeared from 1971 [...]

Culture Notes: Oscar Specials

The special awards at the Oscars are a chance to reward worthy careers and correct huge oversights (Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock had to wait for Specials to get their hands on statuettes, inexcusable lapses that help explain Hitchcock’s snippy two-word acceptance speech: “Thank you”). The 2010 ceremony, continuing its spirit of abundance – 10 nominees [...]

Last Year at Graceland

Last Year at Graceland: The Story Behind Elvis Presley’s Lost Film
by Robert Horton
 Actual listing from the Turner Classic Movies website, August 16, 2002:
“3:00 PM – TICKLE ME/1965
A wealthy man tries to convince a bored socialite that they had an affair years earlier. Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoeff. D: Alain Resnais. C-91m.”
 
In the ill-starred filmography [...]

Culture Notes: 1969 Again; John Hughes

1969: The Encyclopedia Britannica blog is turning loose author/professor Raymond Benson on a gradually-unfolding ten best list for 1969. Maybe because I am doing my own ten-best project (including 1969), the Britannica people invited me to leave comments about Benson’s choices, which could lead to much debate if Mr. Benson’s 1968 list is any clue [...]

Culture Notes: Underworld, Cable Nausea

The Rose Theatre in Port Townsend, Washington, is one of the pleasantest, coziest places to see a movie, period. On June 28 the Rose hosts the much-huzzahed Alloy Orchestra for two live performances of their original score for Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 classic Underworld, which despite being a classic is all too rarely screened. More [...]

Culture Notes: SIFF start; Scarecrow

The Seattle International Film Festival is underway, kicking off Thursday night with the British political satire In the Loop, a regularly funny film with some extremely good actors’ moments for the likes of Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Mimi Kennedy, and David Rasche. I was taping bits with Art Zone host Nancy Guppy for a Seattle [...]

Culture Notes: Jarre, Soundtracking, Obama Burana

If you love movies, you know that movie music can take on its own life outside the film, following you around and joining the soundtrack going on inside your head. Maurice Jarre, who died on March 29, was a composer whose melodies inhabit my own cranial orchestra hall. Not my favorite composer, more than a little [...]

Culture Notes: It’s De-Fascist

It is gratifying that the recent Republican push to shift its criticism of the Obama administration from “socialist” to “fascist” has been exposed as a laughably calculated strategy. Saul Anuzis, who ran for the Republican Party chairmanship and has recently joined a Newt Gingrich-led group called American Solutions for Winning the Future (in the future, all men may have [...]

Culture Notes: Leave it to Beaver

Alison Bechdel’s review of Jane Vandenburgh’s memoir A Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century appeared in the New York Times Book Review in comic-book form in the March 29 edition, a witty approach that not only shows off Bechdel’s crisp style but surely gave the Book Review editors a break from printing yet another [...]