‘To Rome With Love’: the remarkable survival of Woody Allen
His movies have been full of talk about death and the futility of life for 40 years, but Woody Allen has never let his morbid obsessiveness get in the way of his work ethic. Watching the charming but...
View Article‘Everything or Nothing’: 50 years of James Bond
Imagine if in 1962 movie audiences were still seeing variations on the silent hits of 1912. That’s the position we are now in with the James Bond franchise, which started 50 years ago, long before...
View Article‘The Manchurian Candidate’ from page to screen (twice)
Film books published by universities are often unreadably academic, but I had the best time with “What Have They Built You to Do?” (University of Minnesota Press), by Matthew Frye Jacobson and Gaspar...
View ArticleDoes anyone still listen to DVD commentary tracks?
With so many people I know switching to downloading movies via the Internet, rather than watching them on DVD, the days of the director/actor commentary track seem to be numbered. And who will miss...
View ArticleBetter at home — Visconti’s stunning ‘L’Innocente’
Nine times out of ten, I’m a believer in seeing movies in theaters rather than at home on television, but ever since the introduction of the DVD and its technical improvements in transferring film to...
View Article‘Allen Klein’: the money side of 1960s rock
Veteran music journalist Fred Goodman has written an eye-opening account of the behind-the-scenes business struggles of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones during that period in the 1960s when both...
View Article#FridayReads ‘The Hirschfeld Century’ – art as history
A historian as well as an artist, the late great Al Hirschfeld gave us a vivid record of more than 80 years of stage productions in New York. Hirschfeld’s caricatures – which ran regularly in The New...
View ArticleThe return of master satirist Richard Condon
Good news from the eBook division of Mysterious Press this week. On Tuesday, the electronic imprint issued six Richard Condon novels that have long been out of print, including two of his darkly...
View ArticleHow Woody Allen makes movies
You don’t have to be a Woody Allen fan to enjoy the new Eric Lax book “Start to Finish” (Knopf) – it’s one of the most informative and entertaining accounts of the making of a movie that I’ve ever...
View ArticleIs this the end of Woody Allen?
An era in film history seems to be ending quietly, with the news last week that Woody Allen’s “A Rainy Day in New York” will not open in theaters this year (or maybe ever), and the writer-director’s...
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