PhotosDel Mar puts off sea rise plan
Not ready to move 600 homes inland
Sheila Pell 11 a.m., Oct. 22
Scott Marks
Articles by Scott Marks
Roger Corman at the Dollar Tree
Local live wire faves
This week’s trio of discs came to me from various sources, reliable or otherwise. — Scott Marks The Black String (2019) Sensing a local angle, PR rep Justin Cook saw to it that a copy ...
Woman’s Liberation Cinema: from Kate Millett to Jane Fonda
“If Charlton Heston were a woman, would he have maintained the same career?”
Take a break from the E! True Hollywood Story mode of storytelling that’s currently passing for documentary filmmaking with these three gritty women’s documentaries. Three Lives (1971) A novelty at its time of release: this ...
Renée Zellweger’s Judy Garland sings a sad song
Who among us wants to die with a bunch of nobodys?
Pick a celebrity biopic. Any celebrity biopic. Beyond the Sea? Okay. With the lighting just so — and the camera at a safe distance from its subject — a person could swear that it was ...
JLo and Marc Anthony: box office gold?
The black-and-white footage is a textbook compendium of video interview clichés
Three films and no common thread; it’s that kind of week How the West Was Won (1962) When I was six, the owner of mom’s beauty parlor rigged a raffle and my family “won” tickets ...
Fagara: Sisters doing it for themselves
A film told from a feminist point-of-view by three smart, strong, and self-reliant actresses
Occupational Hazard #29, aka The Installment Plan: when a critic oversteps a self-imposed two-film-a-day limit, conks out halfway through a picture, and finishes watching it the next morning. The rating for Heiward Mak’s Fagara was ...
Blake Edwards’ most personal, and impersonal, works
At the core of the film’s publicity was the playful tarnishing of Julie Andrews’ unassailable image
Two from Blake Edwards and a different shade of Pink Panther. Darling Lili (1970) One of director Blake Edwards’ most polished and personal works, Darling Lili was a musical released at a time when both ...
Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles: Keeping it surreal in the land without bread
If I were asked to name ten favorite filmmakers who forever changed the face of cinema, Buñuel would be five of them.
Luis Buñuel’s third film, Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread), was the director’s only documentary. For his first feature, visual effects designer Salvador Simó’s Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles puts into cartoon motion an ...
Dazzling stereoscopic table-top animation from Max and Dave Fleischer
“Mommy. Is ‘dancing on the moon’ another way of saying ‘making babies?’”
Welcome to the transmogrifying squash-and-stretch universe of studio animators Max and Dave Fleischer. Much of the humor flies in the face of political correctness, it’s my honor to announce. For links to the shorts, visit ...
Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo: More dead hippies
All the viewer needs to know about the political climate is established in the silent two-minute launching shot.
The opening shot is a film’s calling card, an image of introduction. The best of them shape, inform, and herald the tone for what lies ahead. So instead of wasting an audience’s time with an ...
