Sherbrooke writes:
This is silent star/comedienne Colleen Moore. I’ve never seen anyone remotely like her; she looked like a rag doll and moved like a loose-limbed marionette. But unless they’re very much into silents, few people know her name today. When she is discussed, it is usually in an argument about whether she or Louise Brooks was the first to cut her hair into a smooth, black bob. That whole discussion seems pointless to me. … but to split two hairs, Brooks entered movies in 1925, and then in only a minor way, so her bob did not affect moviegoers or fads. Moore, on the other hand, cut her hair before 1923.
Moore starred in 1923’s flapper film, Flaming Youth. (Only a reel survives. Its publicity used the phrase “neckers, petters, white kisses, red kisses, pleasure mad daughters, … sensation craving mothers.” It didn’t refer to the many laughs.)
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “I was the spark that lit up Flaming Youth and Colleen Moore was the torch. What little things we are to have caused that conflagration.” Unfortunately, in the early 30s, Fitzgerald’s introduction to his book “The Crack-Up” referred to the movie’s star as Clara Bow. That is Moore’s fate–to be confused with Brooks and Bow, though the three women are distinctly different. Moore needs a retrospective–and a DVD set. Many of her films are lost, but enough are still out there to make it happen.
Sherbrooke writes:
This must be the strangest publicity still ever taken. I’m not even sure it was taken to promote the movie. But whatever it’s selling (women’s kerchiefs? Musical of Psycho? Perkins’ fan club?), it’s radically terrible.
Sax von Stroheim writes:
I keep looking for the modern day equivalent of those Douglas Sirk-Ross Hunter movies: weepies, melodramas, and “women’s pictures” that are stylish and smart without skimping on the sentimentality. I haven’t found one yet, but I did like Safe Haven, which was adapted from a Nicholas Sparks novel (Sparks took a more active role in the production of this film, too). Lasse Hallström directs in a very square, straightforward, old-fashioned style, making for an effective, conventional tear-jerker. Or, at least, I can honestly say that it worked on me. I infinitely prefer this kind of corny, heartfelt romantic melodrama to “indie” romances about two special snowflakes meeting and falling in love with each other’s quirkiness. I’m glad this movie found an audience despite getting trashed by critics. I guess Nicholas Sparks is the white Tyler Perry.
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Paleo Retiree writes:
A hyper-ambitious new social-welfare program is in a seemingly hopeless tangle? O, who could have predicted such a thing! From Slate:
If you contract something out and get 500 million lines of code back, there’s no way it’s going to work correctly.
Glynn Marshes writes:
“. . . when it’s telling no story at all.”
From the video essay The Art of Editing in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, a professorial analysis of the Trio scene. (Very professorial. Be prepared to be annoyed by the tone :-))
But here’s my question: was any of this done consciously by Leone? My guess is “no.” Absolutely not.
Acknowledged btw by the narrator (Max Tohline) at the end of the lesson when he asks
What else can editing do? As with all aesthetic questions about film, we can never really be sure what else will be until artists discover it.
Blowhard, Esq. writes:
Click on the image to enlarge.
…Anna May Wong. Photograph by George Hurrell, 1938.
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Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
I really like the documentary work of Billy Corben. He’s got a feel for muckraking sensationalism as well as a knack for weaving talking-head interviews into dense, colorful swathes of information. You can sense his inquisitiveness, his wiliness, and his sensitivity: his movies brush up against all sorts of unusual, sometimes un-PC ideas without becoming declamatory or turning into polemics. And he seems to have a talent for getting folks to open up. “Broke,” Corben’s ESPN piece about the money mismanagement habits of professional athletes, is both empathetic and unsparingly clear-eyed concerning the mental faculties of its subjects, whose cluelessness seems of a piece with their bravado. Even now, talking about how they squandered millions, they seem to be bragging. As if their recklessness served as further proof of their greatness.
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Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
