The 1940s saw a number of popularizations of psychoanlysis in Hollywood. Most famously, there’s Hitchcock’s Spellbound, but Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door mined similar territory within the women’s gothic. Home of the Brave propped up its problem film drama with a psychoanalytic explanation of racism. There was even a psychoanalysis-themed musical, Lady in the Dark, […]
Just a reminder that our second book club - discussing Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? - convenes tomorrow, at 6PM at the Espresso Royale on Gainsborough, near Northeastern and Symphony.
If you’re looking for some extra reading, the TPMCafe bookclub is worth checking out - I found the Todd Gitlin and Thomas Frank […]
Over at Be a Design Group, Paul Berkbigler complains about the stripping down of graphic impact in logos. He points out a before and after tale between a heyday of corporate design and the watered down, overly rendered style of today. His example is UPS, but I think that changes in Coke and Sprite designs […]
The PBS NewsHour is currently discussing the recent schism in the American labor movement. (See Harold Meyerson’s summary.) If only the representatives of the more established unions could see how tone-deaf they come across. John Sweeney launches into a tirade against the split, but his “that makes me angry” is a thin whine like Marvyn […]
Good thing that I have some local bloggers keeping me up-to-date on what’s going around town. First, Derek of Third Decade points me to the Roxbury Film Festival, which has put out its schedule and list of films for this year’s offerings, which show in mid-August. Some of the shorts sound pretty interesting, and I’ll […]
Over at Digital Poetics, Nicholas Rombes compares and contrasts amateur, home-movie culture of the 1950s with the postwar American avant-garde. He writes,
it’s too easy to divide amateur aesthetics in the 1950s-60s into two diametrically opposed camps: the avant garde (Mekas, Brakhage, Deren, etc.) and the middle-class hobbyist (i.e., all the amateur film clubs and publications […]
I’ve proposed before a pet thesis that the documentary revival of the last couple of years represents, among other things, the return of totality to documentary filmmaking. By which I mean that documentarist have renewed interest in seeing large-scale political economic relations through the particulars of everyday life. Not every filmmaker is a would-be Joris […]
Easy on the back lighting!
Source: AP, via Boston Globe
I swear it’s coincidence that the book club is taking up What’s the Matter with Kansas? the same week that TPMCafe is starting their book club with the very same. Sadly, this blog has neither budget nor clout to fly Thomas Frank to Boston to join us. But I heartily recommend reading and joining us […]
Matt Yglesias writes one invaluable post today.
I fear that liberals and progressives are taking the wrong lesson from the Kerry loss. The problem wasn’t that Democrats chose a strategy based on expectations of the general election, it was that in this instance the choice was a poor one (admittedly in a tough field), short-circuited even […]
I’ve written on giallo films before, and have gotten on an Italian horror kick lately. Even (especially) for the skeptical, I’d recommend an open mind and a fair chance. (Read this warning first.) The “masterworks” of the 60s and 70s Italian horror, from Mario Bava or Dario Argento, are undeniably stylistic coups, adopting the language […]
As someone who lived in Cambridge for four years, I agree with Bostonist: Cambridge’s voting system is confusing. And I’ll go further and say that it’s an ultimately undemocratic system and one that should give pause to progressives wanting to elevate PR on a larger scale. For while it does a good job at including […]
Nice work if you can get it:
Jonathan Bock, a former sitcom writer who founded Grace Hill Media to specialize in Christian marketing, was hired to help sell Universal’s “Cinderella Man,” Fox’s “Kingdom of Heaven” and Sony Pictures’ “Christmas With the Kranks.” And he is currently advising Sony on what is likely to be one of […]
Is the serious Orson Welles ripe for reexamination? By the time he made the Trial, he was merely laying claim to the international art film he’d done so much to found. The undeniable stylistic verve, the sly quoting of the decade’s big filmmakers, and the narrative ambiguity gave the fish-eye lenses and low angle ceiling […]
The next book club will be taking up Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? Contrary to what I mentioned before we won’t be meeting next Thursday, but the Thursday after, July 28. Meeting time is 6PM, at the Espresso Royale near Northeastern (Gainsborough Street, off Huntington). I’ll research a few outside readings, whether from […]