Reaction Shots

As a kid, I found Bob Hope one of the more annoying adults. His shtick was tiresome, the jokes the very definition of patience-trying, but he had something going for him. Regardless of how little I found to laugh at, he delivered his routine with expert timing, measured beats, and a ridiculous amount of charm for a guy whose propensity for mugging should have been a turn-off.  But that's just it. It wasn't mugging; he let his audience in on the whole thing. He knew the jokes were lame, but he also knew that it wasn't the jokes that were landing; it was the whole engagement of letting everyone know how the routine was structured, how sub-par the material was, but that the delivery and the relationship with his audience was what made the whole scene work. I found that amazing as a kid; but it also impressed me how many adults really thought those puns and dad jokes (before they were called "dad jokes") were funny.  Of course, a lot of people of my parents' gener...

A couple of years ago, I wrote up some reflections about the eradication of Greenwood, the "Black Wall Street" , of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Part of this was inspired by the conversation brought up by my friend Eric Stover who worked on the Nova program devoted to that tragedy. I'd be less than honest if some of the writing wasn't also inspired by the streaming series Watchmen , a particularly moving mini-series with its roots in the event and which bring it to the forefront of cultural dialog and resurrecting it from being lost to history. The Osage Murders began in 1921 and continued through 1925, wherein 60 people (at least, the number may be 150 or higher) - mostly Osage tribal members, were murdered. As happens with the marginalized and disenfranchised in the United States, the wheels of justice barely turned at all, until the Osage people simply couldn't take it anymore. Some people may balk: but the Osage were wealthy! Oil had been discovered on their land and they...

Before intelligent zombies, before the zombie genre-as-thematically-rich, before cannibalistic zombies even, the zombie was a useful and provocative tool for the bad guy in its earliest iterations. This is not to say that the early films weren't thematically rich, but at a remove of ninety years, the themes are imposed by advances in civil rights and how we view the effects of colonialism and cultural appropriation. I'll add, too, that as with so many films we find challenging from earlier eras, this doesn't necessarily stop them from being entertaining. Both of the films here use the zombie in its form as a kind of golem; resurrected dead to be employed for labor or executing someone else's will by the use of Voudou/voodoo rituals or ancillary animistic magic.  A cursory glance into the word's etymology is enlightening: "also zombi, jumbie, 1788, possibly representing two separate words, one relating to the dead and the other to authority figures, but if so hi...

Context and the mileux of  The Red Lantern At fourteen, the young Anna May Wong fully besotted by motion pictures, was picked as one of 300 Chinese and Chinese Americans for a crowd scene in The Red Lantern , starring Alla Nazimova, at the time the most celebrated actress in cinema and renowned for her theater work. The film centers around Nazimova in yellowface (and this term will show up repeated throughout this series) in a dual role as Mahlee, a Eurasian woman and Blanche Sackville, her half-sister (who is fully caucasian.) The backdrop of the film is the Boxer Rebellion of 1901 and while I will be reviewing it elsewhere, due to this series being about Anna May Wong, I'm giving it a more than passing mention because of its and Alla Nazimova's significance in AMW's life.  It is difficult to overstate how much movies meant to Anna May Wong as an adolescent, how important Alla Nazimova was in cinema at the time, and how pervasive women and the power they wielded in the ind...

Anna May Wong, 1937/source unknown This has been a long while in coming. For the past decade or so, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around about how gender-based inequity and systemic exclusion of women from the American workforce changed rapidly in the years prior to the Great Depression. The emphasis in this blog, of course, is cinema; but I think what we see in the early years of film in the United States is a mirror to the overall westward expansion of the late nineteenth century and how the lack of regulation of the business of filmmaking allowed for more voices, and a greater, more equal distribution of power and profit.  What I hope to accomplish in this series is a kind of case by case examination of the overall trends in the industry in the years leading up to the Stock Market Crash of 1929, more or less the last year when women exercised any power of note in film production beyond editing, continuity, or acting. This is the backdrop/context to the industry when Anna May ...

This is the last of the New Jersey Double Features Review/Recap and the first of this year’s Halloween theme: ZOMBIES!!! Chief Cliff Robertson : What do you think did this? Officer Ronnie Peterson : I'm thinking zombies. Chief Cliff Robertson : What? Officer Ronnie Peterson : You know, the undead. Ghouls. From The Dead Don’t Die The Return of the Living Dead might be the best 80s zombie movie that George Romero didn’t direct. Directed by Dan O’ Bannon who up till this time, had graced the world with scripts for Carpenter’s Dark Star, Scott’s Alien, and would go onto write Total Recall, there is a vigor and almost gonzo energy in the performances. They’re all (and rightly so) dialed up to 11 and it’s great.  After all, we’ve got zombies created by the U.S. military! If Romero  would take a more steady and satirical eye toward social issues, O’ Bannon and his writers (Rudy Ricci who had worked on this and a weird comedy/sci-fi/exploitation flick The Liberation of Cherry Janowsk...