SpoutBlog (Free subscription) | 31/08/2008
Richard Schickel's dishy, sentimental documentary on the history of Warner Brothers will ensure that you never look at a Busby Berkeley musical quite the same way ever again.
Pruned (Free subscription) | 26/08/2008
(One of Busby Berkeley's musical numbers from Footlights Parade , 1933.)
Cinema Blend (Free subscription) | 25/08/2008
Got a spare $5 billion and want to bulk up your movie collection?
The New Yorker - Arts and Culture (Free subscription) | 25/08/2008
Criterion releases a trio of exquisite nineteen-fifties literary adaptations by Max Ophüls: “The Earrings of Madame de…,” from a novel by Louise de Vilmorin; “La Ronde,” based on Arthur Schnitzler’s play; and “Le Plaisir,” featuring three stories by Guy de Maupassant (Sept. 16). Musicals, pre- and postwar, are coming . . .
New York Magazine (Free subscription) | 25/08/2008
True stoner classics rarely have actual weed in them.
Mad Hare (Free subscription) | 22/08/2008
Robert Towle on his prolific and informative blog, Towleroad , has posted a picture of the upcoming Democratic National Convention's stage. They are either living up to the aphorism "Presentation is important," or they're planning a production of Moulin Rouge. Either way, I suspect it will be one hell of a show!
SpoutBlog (Free subscription) | 15/08/2008
I’m heading out a bit early for the weekend (yes, the Week in Review is on its way), but before I go I want to give a shout out to some of TCM’s Summer Under the Stars programming coming up this weekend. Across Saturday and Sunday, they’re saluting the two greatest male musical stars of [...]
Trinidad Express (Free subscription) | 14/08/2008
The United States even has a name for its right to intervene in its neighbours' affairs: the Monroe Doctrine. And just as Russia moved to undermine a militantly pro-American government on its borders, so the United States moved to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs and depose the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and green-lighted an attempted coup against Venezuela's Hugo Chavez in 2002. None of these interventions...
Who Is IOZ? (Free subscription) | 13/08/2008
Let us examine Harold Meyerson : China is something else again. If ever there was a display of affable collectivism, it was filmmaker Zhang Yimou's opening ceremonies, which in their reduction of humans to a mass precision abstraction seemed to derive in equal measure from Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl. (Much of Berlin's 1936 Olympics, we should recall, was choreographed by Riefenstahl to fit...
Seattle Weekly (Free subscription) | 13/08/2008
Screened outdoors at dusk, courtesy of Three Dollar Bill, this 1943 musical was directed by Busby Berkeley, though "orchestrate" might be a better word for the festivities. Carmen Miranda, Alice Faye, the dancing Nicholas brothers, and Benny Goodman plus his band are involved in the GI-falls-for-a-c...
SpoutBlog (Free subscription) | 12/08/2008
Via CNN via Anne Thompson comes the full lineup for The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, the film festival thrown by recent Oscar winner Tilda Swinton and guest programmed by some of her and Joel Coen, starting this Friday in “Nairn in the North East of Scotland, a seaside town where Chaplin used to holiday [...]
Baristanet (Free subscription) | 09/08/2008
Be afraid, be very afraid. The Chinese have fierce drummers, thousands of guys who can dance, run and perform synchronized martial arts with Busby Berkeley precision, and enough technological wizardry to put Pixar to shame. And we thought our iPhones were cool. Trust me, if Janet Jackson's boob had popped during this extravaganza, nobody would have even noticed. (Photograph, by Creative Commons license,...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 09/08/2008
Ballerina Ballroom, Fri 15 to Aug 23
USA Today (Free subscription) | 08/08/2008
Let politics-laced Games begin Nicholas Wapshott, columnist, in The New York Sun: "The Beijing Olympics will open with a ceremony that will be half Busby Berkeley, half Nuremberg rally. It will be the most overtly political Olympiad since 1936. …...
Salt Lake Tribune (Free subscription) | 06/08/2008
It probably would be great fun to have a pint with Tilda Swinton. The offbeat actress, an Oscar winner for her role in "Michael Clayton," has launched her very own film festival, according to this report - and the event, starting next week in the Scottish seaside town of Nairn, looks like a heck of a party. The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams (don't you just love that title) is named for
