Dear Academy Museum, please stop trying to divide us
doesn’t get better: cab, fayard, harold Dear Academy Museum, The Nicholas Brothers were great dancers not ‘Black’ dancers For an institution tripping over itself in an effort to evince sensitivity toward every sector, segment, and demographic that ever walked Planet Earth for the past 3,000 years — a real mission impossible, guys — you keep ...
arts•meme glimpses Francis Ford Coppola’s soon-coming ‘Megalopolis’
Apr
30
2024
Our first glimpse, in single photo, above, of Megalopolis, a Roman Epic fable set in an imagined modern America, a soon-coming motion picture directed, written, produced by Francis Ford Coppola. It goes like this, or so it is said to: The City of New Rome must change, causing conflict between Cesar Catilina, a genius artist ...
Melvin Kaminsky lives. [slideshow]
Apr
29
2024
Melvin Kaminsky (born June 28, 1926) aka Mel Brooks was in fine fettle interviewed at age 97 by Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz during the 2024 TCM Classic Film Festival in its 15th annual staging in Hollywood, California. He explained to an audience gathered at TCL Chinese Theatre for a screening of “Spaceballs” (1987) ...
Hilarious! Quentin Tarantino directs ‘Pulp Fiction’ dance number
An on-set devil captured footage as Quentin Tarantino directed Uma Thurman and John Travolta in their iconic twist to a Chuck Berry song. It does beg the question: Is that how John Ford directed? Tarantino demonstrated on a British talk show host his inspiration for the choreography. artsmeme interviews a dancer/choreographer who did not do ...
Pre-Code movies rediscovered in Los Angeles (TCM Fest) & New York (MoMA)
Apr
25
2024
loretta young, spencer tracy, man’s castle At the fifteen annual Turner Classic Movies TCM Fest, just completed in Hollywood, we most enjoyed two marvelous movies, Only Yesterday (1933) in which Margaret Sullavan bucks the stigma of her single motherhood and The Good Fairy (1935) with Sullavan, again, playing a young innocent entangling with marital norms, ...
Pas-de-deux in perpetuity: Travolta & Thurman in ‘Pulp Fiction,’ at TCM Fest 2024
At the conclusion of the witty dance duet between Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), on the dance floor of a kooky retro coffee-shop-style restaurant, the full auditorium of TCM Fest 2024‘s opening night gala at the TCL Chinese Theatre broke into spontaneous applause. The occasion was the screening of Pulp Fiction ...
Hooray for the ‘Discoveries’: lesser-known gems of TCM Fest 2024
When the TCM Classic Film Festival opens its 15th year in Hollywood this week, you may well choose to see some of the high-profile events at the festival—the star-studded opening night screening of Pulp Fiction, Lady Sings the Blues with co-star Billy Dee Williams in person, North by Northwest introduced by filmmaker Nancy Meyers, or ...
Film museum … or oil refinery?
Everyone thinks that the Academy Museum at Wilshire and Fairfax, was a repurposed May Company department store, but as a story in Curbed L.A. demonstrates, it was inspired by an oil refinery. We’ve been living around them forever! And to prove it, the Museum is staging a new exhibition featuring the kinds of clothes people ...
Poised for paw prints at TCM Classic Film Fest 2024: Jodie Foster
Mar
21
2024
Hollywood has special affection for kid actors. The best of them are survivors, and craftspeople for whom the presence of a a movie camera is nearly an extension of their own selves. And that well describes the natural way that Jodie Foster, grabbed attention at age ten in her first movie, Alice Doesn’t Live Here ...
John Waters, son of P.T. Barnum
He was irrepressible. In 1959, filmmaker John Waters posted announcements on telephone poles of his Baltimore neighborhood. From the start, he was both a creator and a P.T. Barnum impresario. Culled from the costumes, props, handwritten scripts, correspondence, scrapbooks, photographs, film clips, and more, included in “John Waters, Pope of Trash,” the major exhibition dedicated ...