"Allen v. Farrow" holds up Woody Allen's "Manhattan" as incontrovertible proof that he's an incestuous pedophile. Is it valid, or a specious argument?...
I enjoyed Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past so much that my first reaction was to write that type of non-critique they explicitly tell you not to submit in Cinema Studies 101: “I really, really liked this movie. It was a lot of fun. Everything from the script to the cinematography to the editing was perfect! I mean, for this gender of movie, of course. And Wolverine is in a lot of it, which is awesome because he’s my fave X-Man, and he’s so badass rocking that early-70s swag!”
Indeed, this is more a spinoff Wolverine than an X-Men, although strictly speaking Hugh Jackman would need to be on screen a least fifteen percent more for it to be entirely his as the hero.
I don’t read reviews or production notes before I see films, so it wasn’t until almost the end of Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine that I realized it was inspired by A Streetcar Named Desire. Allen has done a number of homages to other filmmakers or based his movies on classics, but this is a jazz riff so accomplished that it transforms a disturbing meltdown into a pleasant experience.
THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEW
by James Killough
Shortly after his disastrous foray into animation with Arthur and the Invisibles in 2006, semi-auteur Luc Besson announced he was retiring from directing. Steven Soderbergh did the same thing last year. Both have been directing since they were in their mid-twenties, and the process has clearly long since lost its appeal. As Marcello Mastroianni, playing an uninspired director in Federico Fellini’s autobiographical 8 ½, says in a panic to his lading lady Claudia Cardinale, “Ma non c’ho niente più da dire!” But I have nothing left to say!
"Next motherfucker tells me I have a 'bootie like Beyoncé,' I'll blow a hole in his groin with the Mossberg 500. How's my hair?"
Or, as Michael Bay’s putative natural father John Frankenheimer—who was so furious that Bay claimed to be his son that he tried to disprove it, but failed—said in an NPR interview shortly before he died, “Directing is for younger men.” What Frankenheimer, who directed the seminal thriller French Connection, was referring to was the sort of hyper-kinetic action adventure films he helped pioneer with Connection, and which his natural son took to an extreme that I am not alone in considering unwatchable, despite the fact my dog Henry co-starred in Bay’s graduating student film at Wesleyan University.
CRAMER VS KILLOUGH | REVIEW starring Christopher Cramer & James Killough We've already run Baker's review of Midnight in Paris, but Chris is a huge Woody Allen fan, and felt he needed to be fully self-expressed about it on tape. There are moments in the review when his hair becomes like the...
BAKER STREET
by Eric J Baker
Editor’s Note: This marks the 100th post on the PFC blog, which wouldn’t mean much if this were TMZ with a dozen fluffy gossip posts an hour, but a PFC piece requires a lot of TLC to create. It’s only appropriate that Eric Baker take this honor because it is he who kicked us over the 4,000-views-a-day mark on Friday with his Duran Duran story. — James Killough
We were talking movie directors here the other day (actually, I was talking movie directors and Killough was like, “Yeah whatever, Baker—shut the fuck up—I know”) and Roman Polanski came up, not for his movies but for his marriage to Sharon Tate. The Polanski-Tate union suffered from the dreaded Billy Joel-Christie Brinkley syndrome years before medical science had even identified the disease, which occurs when an ugly, talented man marries a beautiful, possibly talented, but who cares, she’s a goddess, woman. And Sharon Tate was a goddess.
But, Sharon, why Frodo? WHY?
You may know that Tate was murdered in 1969 by Charles Manson’s gang and that Polanski went on to perpetrate a sexual act against a 13-year-old girl in the mid 1970s.