Fifty Shades of Grey is not horrible. In fact, the first hour isn’t bad at all. A dry, offbeat charm complements a delicate story structure that would be at home in any generic romance film. The second hour, however, is an epic endurance test. This material is woefully thin, and because the filmmakers have scaled back the smut factor, there’s not enough eye candy to keep things interesting, either. By the end, you’ll be fifty shades of bored.
Between the time he directed his last film — Imitation of Life, in 1959 — and his death in 1987, Douglas Sirk managed to see his critical stock rise considerably. His work, specifically his 1950s work for Universal, went from being dismissed as soapy fluff to being reevaluated as sly, barbed condemnations of the social values …
Letter From An Unknown Woman Directed by Max Ophüls Starring Louis Jordan and Joan Fontaine USA, 86 min – 1948. “Have you ever shuffled faces like cards, hoping to find one that lies somewhere, just over the edge of your memory?” In 1900s Vienna, a former concert pianist and notorious womanizer, Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) …
The Crowd Directed by King Vidor Written by King Vidor and John V.A. Weaver USA, 1928 The Crowd is that rarest of all Hollywood productions – a studio-made film that was never intended to make money. Released by industry leader MGM in March 1928, this magnificent cinematic treatise on the pitfalls of American Dreaming was …
The terms “melodrama” and “melodramatic” have for a long time been pejoratives in artistic circles. A quick look at thesaurus.com brings up “artificial”, “hammy”, “overdramatic”, and “stagy” as synonyms, among others, and for many, the term is often accompanied by an eyeroll or similar indicator of contempt. As mainstream theatre transitioned from pantomime and ballet …