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Stanley Kubrick the Studio Auteur

Throughout the 1960s-early 1970s, a combination of financial desperation, creative daring, and an adventurous movie-going public had produced a creative detonation in mainstream American movies not seen before or since.  Each year of the period seemed to bring at least one mightily ambitious visual experiment by a new contributor to the commercial movie scene, the …

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Find Your Jesus, Find Your Kubrick: Lady Gaga as Auteur

For a while, Lady Gaga was one of the most fascinating music stars that had come in a while, primarily because of her unapologetic bombast. Too often, though, she may have been written off as “weird”, from her odd fashion decisions, her performance art appearances on TV, and, of course, her music videos. Gaga, née Stefani …

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Rainbow Coalition: Top 10 Movie Titles with Color and Substance

Sure, it would be easy to rattle off all sorts of movie titles that feature the name of colors. Go ahead and knock yourself out: The Pink Panther, Red Dawn, Yellow Submarine, Purple Rain, Blue Velvet, Goldfinger, etc. The listing seems rather endless. However, can one come up with color-contained movie titles that also carry some messaging …

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Ranking the Films of Stanley Kubrick

There are few auteurs as instantly recognizable and divisive as Stanley Kubrick, few filmmakers as idiosyncratic or groundbreaking. His work spans the entirety of life itself–sometimes in the same film–and has inspired almost as much derision as hosannas. There is no easy consensus on Kubrick’s films–though you may not be terribly surprised by our writers’ …

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Kubrick’s Films and Their Relationship to Violence in Society

Over the course of his career, legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick made movies in various genres tackling a number of ideas. Entirely separate films have been made simply to document the various interpretations of just one of his films, and his attention to detail has been well-documented. Thus, a look at the themes Kubrick presents in …

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Still Holding Out for Mister J

Here the focus will be on the Joker and the argument will be we have yet to see a proper rendition on the big screen (I’m not counting certain interesting videogame versions). Before beginning, one has to concede the Cesar Romero interpretation, whatever its genuine brilliance, was too tame by half to truly merit the top spot yet an argument can be made this is the closest to seeing the Joker in the flesh.

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Toronto After Dark Summer Screening: ‘Detention’; or my bloody breakfast club

Detention Directed by Joseph Kahn Written by Joseph Kahn and Mark Palermo USA, 2011 Remember that scene in A Clockwork Orange when Alex, constrained and with eyes pried open, is forced to watch nasty bits of ultra-violence underscored by Ludwig van’s 9th symphony 4th movement? Well, replace ultra-violence with ultra-style and Beethoven with some Backstreet …

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Post Oscar Thought: Grown Up Films – An Endangered Species?

“When I was a child,” film reviewer Stephen Whitty wrote in “What Happened to Grown-Up Films?” for New Jersey’s state paper, The Star-Ledger, on the day of the Oscars, “most of the big hits in movie theaters were aimed at adults. Now that I’m an adult, most of the big hits in movie theaters are …

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Remember Me:  John Calley (1930-2011) – “A Class Act” 

Hollywood joke:  A writer, a director, and a producer are crawling across the desert without water, dying of thirst.  They look up and sticking out of the sand is a nicely chilled bottle of apple juice.  Before the writer and director can grab it, the producer is on his feet, unzips his pants and starts …

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The Studio Auteur: Stanley Kubrick

Throughout the 1960s-early 1970s, a combination of financial desperation, creative daring, and an adventurous movie-going public had produced a creative detonation in mainstream American movies not seen before or since.  Each year of the period seemed to bring at least one mightily ambitious visual experiment by a new contributor to the commercial movie scene, the …

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