Pre-Code Capsules - SCARLET EMPRESS, LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT, THE BARBARIAN, FRIENDS AND LOVERS, THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US

SCARLET EMPRESS, THE1934 - ****Von Sternberg was a genius but one could argue he never quite entered the sound era, preferring the language of symbols, small gestures, posed tableaux, and intertitles -all of which nearly suffocates the first half of SCARLET EMPRESS. Taken from the then still-sizzling diaries of the sexually voracious Catherine II of Russia, the film begins in a flower-encrusted choke-hold as the life of a regimented life of a young...

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The 5 Final Destinations Nation, but a dream within a dream...

 The most effective teen horror films, like HALLOWEEN and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, know that closed-down gold mines or prom trains or the moon or other weird settings don't scare us as much as something coming for us in the place we're from--suburbia. The FINAL DESTINATION series gets this right. With flash-cut minutiae of hazardous modern life, a dozen nurse's office wall's worth of queasy safety warning poster moments, it goes where no other...

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His Girl Friday vs. CNN: Boston Edition

The turbulent, tragic events in Boston this past week created a curious time ripple in our 24 hour news channels, and they may never recover. The internet has taken the lead now, and by the time CNN catches up, whatever they caught up to is old news. Watching TV at home now is like being a grandpa; your iPad's telling you some serious shit is going down and you turn to CNN, presuming they'll have up-to-the-minute details. You trust them to be on...

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The Blackened Face of the Glory-Bound Golem: WONDER BAR (1934)

Playing like a midnight car accident between a banned entry in Warner's Gold Digger series and a sleazy Dostoevsky-ish existential comedy, Wonder Bar was one of the last films to sneak by the Joe Breen production code jackboot and it all but dares the censors to cross the line backwards in pursuit. Occurring almost in real time over one evening at the titular Parisian nightspot, owned and emceed by Al Wonder (Al Jolson), the movie...

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Hunter S. Thompson reads Kafka, Dissolves

The animators at Buck made this long-form, award-winning, lovely and deeply hallucinatory riff on Hunter S. Thompson for an all-for-charity online book outlet called Goodbooks.com. One of the best things about it is the way it breaks free from the Ralph Steadman aesthetic - there's almost no ink splotches and chaotic shattered charkas; instead it digs deep into the heady peak mushroom moments where everything is always in the middle of turning into...

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CinemArchetype 24: Death

The final frontier. Do we have anything, really, to fear from it? As the kids all say just before being Rube Goldbergianly sliced to ribbons in the FINAL DESTINATION movies, 'it's a part of life; if it happens, it happens... but it's not an intelligent, scheming force - that's ridiculous!'And then, of course, that intelligent force dices them real pretty.But Death has always been personified in films, plays, novels. And who's to say those diced kids...

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