Great Movies
MZS
Roger Corman's Greatest Legacy Was Giving So Many People Their Big Break
A brief (yet still incredibly long) list of people who were given their first big break in the film business by the late Roger Corman.
A brief (yet still incredibly long) list of people who were given their first big break in the film business by the late Roger Corman.
A look at the use of music in the Star Trek series and how the season finale of Discovery recalled its legacy.
An essay on the underrated scores of late composer James Horner.
Secret sounds in movies and TV; The setting of "True Detective"; Marc Maron's chat with Obama; "The Fisher King": In the Kingdom of the Imperfect; The Knickerbocker Hotel's haunted history.
Sheila writes: I came across an amusing item in T-Magazine recently and wanted to share it with you all. Claudia Ficca and Davide Luciano are a collaborative team who have come up with a culinary/artistic project called "All Food No Play." The duo have designed food items inspired by Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining." Here is a small gallery of their work. My personal favorite is the Grady twins cupcakes, but all are quite creative and entertaining - and, hopefully, delicious!
Summer action heroes are several shades of gray; Memories of Baltimore; "Silicon Valley" is not misogynistic; The Onion is not a joke; James Horner on Terrence Malick.
Alan Zilberman looks at the move to minimalism in musical scores, and how those scores shape our emotional reactions.
It's always difficult to put a play on the stage. Actors and crews work hard amid many setbacks that can happen on and behind the stage. If they are lucky, they will survive today's performance with descending curtain and some fulfillment. Then they will have to struggle for another performance tomorrow with today's performance faded into yesterday.
It sounds gloomy, but people in "The Dresser"(1983) stick together and try to go on while believing they are accomplishing something in spite of their mundane reality in and out of theater. At one moment, one character confides to the other about her life spent on theater business: "No, I haven't been happy. Yes, it's been worth it." Norman, played by Tom Courtenay, can say the same thing if asked.
View image The House Next Door.
Now that Matt Zoller Seitz has announced that he's moving on, back to Dallas from Brooklyn and into full-time filmmaking, I thought I'd take a quick glance over the shoulder at some of the writing he's done at his home, The House Next Door, since he opened the place January 1, 2006. Of course, he's done a lot of other writing -- for The Dallas Observer, The Newark Star-Ledger (the Sopranos' hometown paper), the New York Press and the New York Times among other outlets -- but he became a habit with me through the House.
Matt has been a generous proprietor (sometimes perhaps too generous, but that's hardly a grievous fault). Today the House Next Door masthead lists more than 40 contributors -- novices and vets alike -- including the invaluable editor-cum-landlord Keith Uhlich.
At the same time that I'm excited for Matt (who, by the way, I've never met face-to-face), I'm not going to pretend I'm not bummed. This is how I deal with the grief part: Let's celebrate MSZ for all he's done in (and for) the blogosphere. Consider this a very short clip reel. As the lights go down on one phase of Matt's career, and the curtain opens on another, sit back and immerse yourself...
Oh, and sorry about that headline, guys. (That's as in Zoller-, not polter-.)
Open House (first House Next Door post, January 1, 2006): My grandfather, a self-educated German-American farmer from Olathe, Kansas, believed that no journey, however seemingly circuitous or self-destructive, was ever truly unnecessary, or even avoidable. Sometimes we just have to continue along a particular path for inexplicable, personal reasons, disregarding warnings of friends and family and perhaps our own internal voices, until we arrive at our destination, whatever it may be. This type of journey, my grandfather said, was the equivalent of "driving around the block backward to get to the house next door."
