8 years ago
All posts by Phuong Le
Modern Love in “The Honeymoon Killers”
The Honeymoon Killers is the kind of title that hints at sensational thrills, a promise true crime movies usually fulfill. The genre enables audiences to engage in voyeuristic pleasures; it reminds them that the terrible scenes they are witnessing are not mere...
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Here’s To Never Growing Up: Paul Mazursky’s 1960s Sex Comedies
Borrowing a line from his 1978 movie An Unmarried Woman, Paul Mazursky once described midlife crisis as a cross between Mary Hartman and Ingmar Bergman. “It’s on the edge of soap opera and the edge of real,” pondered the director, a sentiment that’s rarely ech...
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The Criterion Collection: “The Merchant of Four Seasons”
Rainer Weiner Fassbinder almost never worked on just one project at a time. From 1969 to 1971, the well-known workaholic waltzed from directing more than 10 films to writing several stage plays. The production of The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) proved to b...
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Acting Out: On the Reflexivity of Actors in Crisis
Some actors treat their profession simply like a job. When asked about acting, Spencer Tracy famously offered the following: “Come to work on time, know your lines and don’t bump into the other actors.” But Tracy’s workmanlike approach is certainly not the onl...
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The Women in the Window: Max Ophüls’ Elegance
The woman figure is central to Max Ophuls’ oeuvre. His female protagonists, for the majority of their screen time, often find themselves in pain, because of, well, society, be it financial shortage or unattainable love. As a result, besides the famous use of t...
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Dancing Lady: Joan Crawford as Musical Star
When Joan Crawford was 6, she cut her feet badly after leaping over the front porch in an attempt to skip piano lessons. The doctor thought that she could never walk properly afterwards, but eight months and three operations later, she fully recovered and cont...
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The Celluloid Catwalk: Fashion on Film
Everything looks dreamy on the silver screen. Fashion on film then is the ultimate definition of glamour. As the great philosopher David Bowie has said, or rather, sung, “it’s big and it’s bland and it’s full of fear,” through the cinematic lens, clothes are n...
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Love Streams: When Serge Wrote Fairytales – “Anna” (1967)
Anna is a classic boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-posts-girl’s-picture-all-over-Paris type of film. Serge, a lovestruck photographer played by Jean-Claude Brialy, desperately looks for the girl he crossed paths with at a train station. Haunted by a photogr...
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Tainted Love: Inappropriate Relationships in Film
Romantic love can be a highly uncomfortable concept. Two (or three and even more) people suddenly see their private worlds intertwining and their emotions spiraling out of control. I might be exaggerating, of course; real life rarely, if ever, resembles the mo...
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Love Streams: 5 Criterions on Fandor
I spend more time picking a film to watch than I do actually watching them, but I feel like the folks at Fandor have finally created a solution for my predicament: give me an ultimatum. (And since it's almost Valentine's Day, I feel comfortable telling you tha...
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