In one of those serendipitous quirks of scheduling, two homages to the silent film era are opening at the same time. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a 3D extravaganza adapted from Brian Selznick’s gorgeously illustrated children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, uses the life and work of  Georges Melies as the central mystery for its eponymous hero to uncover. Conceived for 3D, it uses the contemporary (and derided) version of movie magic to look backward at a magician who was famed for his own glorious special effects fakery.

Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist is a labor of love that made to mimic a 1927 silent. It was shot without sound on Hollywood back lots, framed in the old 1.33:1 aspect ratio, and was converted to B&W in post-production. Where Hugo posits Melies’s art as contemporary as the Hollywood blockbuster he is a character inside, The Artist embalms the object of its adoration.

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Whether in the news, online, or around the water cooler, more attention was paid to Black Friday than to Thanksgiving this year. What used to be an unacknowledged tradition for mainstream America—women shopping the day after Thanksgiving while men watched football—has now become a barometer of the American economy. Retailers and their corporate masters outdid themselves in the sheer volume of advertising for Black Friday in the hopes of whipping up the masses into a shopping frenzy. Early bird sales turned into midnight sales, and shoppers revealed the ugly side to this new “holiday” in the stampedes, fights, and pepper-spray incidents that marked Black Friday 2011.

I remember when shopping in the big department stores was festive and fun. Each year, I was able to tap into the Christmas Spirit in the big department stores, which were always decked out in colorful holiday decorations, as I took my time pondering over my gift purchases. Undoubtedly, I was seeing the experience through the haze of memories of Hollywood movies, which have mythologized the department store as an important American social institution. Somewhere along the way, holiday shopping ceased to be festive and fun, but I continue to expect that my shopping experiences will be like those in Miracle on 34^th Street or A Christmas Story. The ugly stories of Black Friday mayhem and madness inspired me to poke around the history of department stores and their depiction in the movies, not only in Christmas films but in all genres.

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Milan, Italy is world famous as a mecca for high fashion, design and the AC Milan football club but the statistics also reveal that it is one of Europe’s most polluted cities, if not the worst, due to smoke spewing factories and auto emissions. Against this gray, industrial backdrop, Luigi Comencini has set his rarely seen but moving 1974 drama, DELITTO D’AMORE (aka Crime of Love), which is now available on DVD from Raro Video, the boutique DVD label from Italy that recently opened a distribution branch in the U.S.       READ MORE

I have something I need to say. It’s something I don’t say often enough, and for that I am sorry. You deserve to hear it. The words are few but powerful.

I love you. I love you, Muppet Movie.

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Any horror fan worth his or her salt (blood salt!) will be asked from time to time to recommend to genre outsiders a spookshow they haven’t already seen… something off-canon, something that isn’t, you know, THE HAUNTING (1963) NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), THE EXORCIST (1973), THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974), THE SHINING (1980), THE EVIL DEAD (1981)… something that is obscure but worthwhile and will bestow upon the new viewer, by virtue of its rarity,a measure of cult  credibility and bragging rights. This query tends to put me into answer-a-question-with-a-question mode: “How hard do you want to look? How far do you want to go? How badly do you want it?” I ask this because a.) I believe the good stuff needs to be earned, it needs to be mined, searched for and b.) there is, as all horror geeks know, a world beneath the one on which we walk around, a netherworld rich and ripe with movie titles not found on the New Releases rack or in the Torture Porn section of your local Best Buy or in the Top 10 lists of established critics who condescend from time to time to write about fright films. Some of these films are foreign and never got a release in the United States; some are American-made and given only a perfunctory release before being remaindered to VHS; some were never given a video cassette release or were dumped onto tape in a form quite different than the way they were meant to be seen. Such is the case of Scott Spiegel’s INTRUDER (1988), which came and went nearly a quarter-century ago and was released by Paramount’s home entertainment arm in a version so truncated, so emasculated, so watered down and namby-pambied that you wonder why the studio bothered acquiring a slasher movie in the first place. Gray market tapes of INTRUDER have circulated for years – some of them from the desk of Scott Spiegel himself – but one still had to put a little effort into acquiring the full Monty, guts and all. Clearly, the people who run Synapse Films are in this camp as they have just released the uncut INTRUDER in a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack that is in its completeness and comprehensiveness nothing less than stunning. And I’m talking meat cleaver to the face stunning. READ MORE

Stuart Hagmann’s THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT (1970) is often dismissed today as a dated relic of the early ‘70s. During its initial release it was singled out for being exploitive and failing to be a straightforward adaptation of the book it was based on. Many critics claimed that Stuart Hagmann’s direction was erratic and too creative for its own good, which supposedly diminished the film’s political message. When I recently set aside some time to watch THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT I prepared myself for the worst. I expected to see a confusing, opportunistic, dated and laughable Hollywood film made to cash in on the political zeitgeist of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. But I came away from the movie with an entirely different opinion and immediately understood why it had been nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1970 and walked away with a Jury Prize. Not only is THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT a much better film than I had anticipated but it’s particularly poignant considering the current political climate. Student protest, police brutality, free speech and social activism are still hot button issues today. Not a lot has changed in 40 years. We’re still fighting the same battles and wrestling with the same complex issues that have been plaguing the country for decades. Like other controversial films from the same period such as MEDIUM COOL (1969), ZABRISKI POINT (1970) and PUNISHMENT PARK (1971), THE STRAWBERRY STATEMENT asked some important questions that still haven’t been answered.

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I’ve spent a large portion of my life in love with history.  From early on, I read about movies and history, usually in that order.  My father had a complete encyclopedia set of American history as well as multiple books on various figures and events in world history.  I read through as many of them as I could and found myself, early on, blending my two loves, of movies and history, together.

What that meant a lot of the time was that I’d watch a movie based on an actual historical event and then anxiously read up on the event afterwards.  I still prefer to do it that way.  When a film is made about a significant event I already know a lot about, the film can suffer in my eyes because the history is too familiar with me.  But when I see the film first, I can enjoy it for the drama inherent to the production and then read about the history.  The interesting thing is, if the movie’s mediocre to bad, I get annoyed by any liberties taken with the history.  When it’s good, I couldn’t care less.

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William A. Wellman was an attractive guy who happened to make a lot of movies, one of those directors who led an entire life before entering the cinema (as salesman, hockey player, soldier). For Wellman and so many other early Hollywood craftsmen, directing was, as John Ford described it, just another “job of work”. Wellman was one industrious worker, credited with 83 shorts and features from 1920 – 1958. He excelled at compact stories of blue-collar types getting sore at each other (or what Manny Farber called “hard-visaged ball bearings standing around – for no damned reason and with no indication of how long or for what reason they have been standing.”), able to create a humming rhythm out of wisecracks and violence. The studios, however, tasked him with tackling much more, leading him to clumsily apply his blunt style to melodramas and comedies (his ’37 Star is Born is especially sluggish). His career is wildly uneven but well worth looking into, especially the period in the 30s where he was cranking out saucy and speedy pre-coders like Night Nurse and Other Men’s Women (both 1931). The Warner Archive has just released a third film from his stellar ’31: Safe in Hell  (along with later Wellman efforts My Man and I (1952) and his final film Lafayette Escadrille (1958)).

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Each semester in my film studies class, I look forward to presenting the work of the Film School Generation of the 1960s and 1970s. Not only do the students respond well to the era of film history that broke the rules, but I am always surprised at how many of the films feel fresh and contemporary. This semester, I showed Dog Day Afternoon. It remains as vibrant and moving as it was 35 years ago when it was first released, undoubtedly because of the caliber of talent behind its making. Director Sidney Lumet, who understood the inner-city madness that was New York in the 1970s, was in his element with this real-life story of a bank robbery gone awry. Cinematographer Victor Klemper infused the shots with movement, either through camerawork or character blocking, which created a visual tension that fit the material. Editor Dede Allen cut with precision and deliberateness to capture the intensity in the dialogue between stars Al Pacino and John Cazale, who improvised many of their scenes.

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