Birth of the Cool: Marcello Mastroianni

   

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Through a Lens Darkly: The Cinematic Worlds of Mario Bava

“Movies are a magician’s forge, they allow you to build a story with your hands… at least, that’s what it means to me. What attracts me in movies is to be presented with a problem and be able to solve it. Nothing else; just to create an illusion, and effect, with almost nothing” —Mario Bava [...]

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Being Bardot

She was the muse of many a creative individual. Director Roger Vadim (her then husband) cast her in two of his most famous films, Serge Gainsbourg made music with her. Bridgette Bardot defined much of the landscape of 1960s pop culture, just as films and music were going “international”. As an actress, she was not [...]

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The Marlowe in My Mind

Dick Powell is a glutton for punishment. More specifically, Powell’s Philip Marlowe is a glutton for punishment. In the 1944 film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farwell, My Lovely, renamed Murder, My Sweet, Dick Powell played the part of the famous private detective as if it might be the last acting gig he ever got. He is [...]

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Welcome to My Nightmare: The Strange Allure of Goblin

Purveyors of the sinister. Raconteurs of the strange. Crawling, twisting music that threatens to make its way into my nightmares, lying in wait for me each time I return. The Italian prog-rock band, Goblin made a name for themselves scoring many Italian movies, but it was Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and George Romero’s international version [...]

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Blood, Booze, Mamet, Morricone: The Untouchables

The Untouchables (1987) Director: Brian De Palma   Barrels of Technicolor blood. Limitless rounds of ammunition. The melodramatic and the absurd. Innocence and clear-eyed reality. All these things run together in the universe that is Brian De Palma’s version of the late 50s TV show, The Untouchables. The violence is graphic, sometimes cartoonishly so, as [...]

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