by Dennis Harvey
At one point in her hypnotically vivid 1995 memoir Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory (which recently got republished as an e-book), Mary Woronov quotes a fellow scenester in that very peculiar mid-60s Manhattan scene as he drunkenly describes her:
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Fifty-seven years ago this week, production began on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo , then titled From Among the Dead.
by Dennis Harvey
The Dog (7 pm) and Dog Day Afternoon (8:55 pm) screen Thursday, September 11 at the Castro Theatre.
Very well-received at the time, Sidney Lumet’s 1975 Dog Day Afternoon still personifies for many people what was so great about 1970s “New Hollywood” cinema: a gritty urban crime tale with depth and humor, stressing character over thrills or FX, aimed squarely at adults. Adding additional frisson was the fact that the story, which might have seemed ridiculous in less capable hands, was, in fact, based on a real-life incident. Continue reading
Later this month we reach the 59th anniversary of James Dean’s untimely death, and this week, Pacific Film Archive is presenting new digital restorations of East of Eden , Rebel Without a Cause , and Giant , the canonical trilogy of sorts that define his brief but enduring film career. James Dean is so thoroughly iconic, so intricately woven into the fabric of Western pop culture, that an article-length summation of his life and work would be pure folly. Instead, here are a trio of book-based angles on the actor and the man-myth. Continue reading
The mythic cult film whose popularity is growing, The Room , will be presented with two special shows at the Piedmont Theatre in Oakland, with in-person appearances by its cult star and filmmaker Tommy Wiseau, on Friday, August 29 and Saturday, August 30, at midnight each night. We celebrate this special occasion with two appreciations of The Room by Dennis Harvey and Tien-Tien L. Jong.
Read two critical perspectives on Finding Fela! (2014, Alex Gibney) , from Michael Fox and Angeline Rodriguez. Finding Fela! opens at the Embarcadero Center Cinema in San Francisco, and the Shattuck Theatre in Berkeley on Friday, August 15, 2014. Continue reading
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