Resources for February 23, 2017

Bocko, Joel. "Not Just O.J.: A seven-point survey of Ezra Edelman’s documentary epic, Made in America." Keyframe (February 21, 2017)

Drouet, Candice. "Wes Anderson's References." (Posted on Vimeo: February 18, 2017)

Gonet, Adam and Joakim Thiesen. "Vampyr." Masters of Cinema Cast #55 (February 22, 2017) ["The first sound-film by one of the greatest of all filmmakers, Vampyr offers a sensual immediacy that few, if any, works of cinema can claim to match. Legendary director Carl Theodor Dreyer leads the viewer, as though guided in a trance, through a realm akin to a waking-dream, a zone positioned somewhere between reality and the supernatural. Traveller Allan Gray (arrestingly depicted by Julian West, aka the secretive real-life Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg) arrives at a countryside inn seemingly beckoned by haunted forces. His growing acquaintance with the family who reside there soon opens up a network of uncanny associations between the dead and the living, of ghostly lore and demonology, which pull Gray ever deeper into an unsettling, and upsetting, mystery. At its core: troubled Gisèle, chaste daughter and sexual incarnation, portrayed by the great, cursed Sybille Schmitz (Diary of a Lost Girl, and inspiration for Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss.) Before the candles of Vampyr exhaust themselves, Allan Gray and the viewer alike come eye-to-eye with Fate — in the face of dear dying Sybille, in the blasphemed bodies of horrific bat-men, in the charged and mortal act of asphyxiation — eye-to-eye, then, with Death — the supreme vampire. Deemed by Alfred Hitchcock ‘the only film worth watching… twice’, Vampyr’s influence has become, by now, incalculable."]

Haag, Pamela. "The Gun Myth." To the Best of Our Knowledge (May 22, 2016) ["The Western. The 2nd Amendment. Guns are a part of our national DNA - like apple pie and baseball. Pamela Haag says not so fast. In her book "The Gunning of America," she argues that early gun barons --with iconic names like Colt and Remington -- created the American gun culture. She told Charles Monroe-Kane to look no further than the Rifle King himself, the manufacturer of the Winchester Repeater Rifle, Oliver Winchester."]

Hedges, Chris. "James Baldwin and the Meaning of Whiteness." Truthdig (February 19, 2017)

Heller, Jason. "Finnish Authors Heat the Speculative Fiction World." NPR (January 24, 2016)

Hudson, David. "Best of 2016, Last Call (Countdown to Oscars)." Keyframe (February 21, 2017)

Koski, Genevieve, Keith Phipps and Scott Tobias. "Batman (1989) / The Lego Batman Movie (Pt. 1)." The Next Picture Show #64 (February 21, 2017) ["This week’s show tells a tale of two Batmen — plus a whole bunch of other Batmen in between. The success of the new family-friendly LEGO BATMAN MOVIE inspired us to go back to a very different earlier iteration of The Caped Crusader: Tim Burton’s 1989 series-starter BATMAN, which took the comic-book hero into darker realms than he’d previously occupied onscreen. In this half, we talk about how Burton and Michael Keaton’s vision for the character functions in the larger context of Batman adaptations over the years, as well as Burton’s subsequent career. "]

---. "Batman (1989) / The Lego Batman Movie (Pt. 2)." The Next Picture Show #65 (February 23, 2017) ["Tim Burton’s BATMAN kick-started the cinematic and pop-culture proliferation of the now-ubiquitous Batman, who today can not only sustain multiple movies at once, but also provides ample fodder for the reference-happy new THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE. In this half of our discussion of all things Batmen, we talk about all the ways LEGO BATMAN draws on — and benefits from — the character’s long history, and consider how the larger Bat Universe has evolved on film since Burton’s day."]

Longworth, Karina. "Veronica Lake (Dead Blondes Episode 4)." You Must Remember This (February 20, 2017) ["Veronica Lake had the most famous hairdo of the 1940s, if not the twentieth century. Her star turn in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels and her noir pairings with Alan Ladd made her Paramount’s biggest wartime draw behind Hope and Crosby, but behind the scenes, Lake was a loner with a drinking problem who didn’t give an F about Hollywood etiquette. Bankrupt and without a studio contract, in the early 1950s she consciously quit movies. She claimed she left Hollywood to save her own life -- so how did she end up dead at 50?"]