Tag: Old Hollywood
The Evolution of Wicked Into Movie Musical Form & Its Enduring Applicability to the Current Moment
A book—or any form of source material, really—hasn’t truly reached its apex “saturation point” in pop culture until going from book to Broadway musical to [Read More…]
Maxxxine: What Ryan Murphy Wishes He Could Do
Over the past decade, Ryan Murphy has positioned himself as the “go-to” for all things campy/pop culture-oriented. More than that, all things “retro” pop culture-oriented. [Read More…]
Martha Stewart’s Sports Illustrated Cover Is A Landmark Moment…But Also Presents a Double Standard in Terms of Praising a “Correct” Way for Women to Be Embraced As “Sexy” at Any Age
There are “kinds” of women who get lauded for doing the same things that other women have already been doing for quite some time. Martha [Read More…]
Lana Del Rey’s “Candy Necklace” Video Deliberately Blurs the Line Between Fantasy and Reality With Its Meta Framework
When an artist reaches a certain point in their career, self-reference can’t be avoided. In Lana Del Rey’s case, that tends to become quite a [Read More…]
Celluloid Immortality Doesn’t Make A Slow Career Death Any Less Painful: Babylon
There is Old Hollywood and then there is Germinal Hollywood (“Silent Era” Hollywood, if you prefer). The latter has been less a fascination in the [Read More…]
First They Took Glamor Out of Cinema, Now Out of M&M’s
There remains an ongoing stigma against Old Hollywood. A.k.a. what some now mockingly call its Golden Age. Some Golden Age, right? When women were thrust [Read More…]
Hollywood Infected Your Brain: MARINA Blows Up the System as Usual in “Venus Fly Trap”
MARINA has long been on that very short list of pop stars in the room who “shouldn’t be here.” At least from the perspective of [Read More…]
Post-2020, Agoraphobics Are The New Empathetic Character: The Woman in the Window
Like Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic that makes for such an obvious comparison to The Woman in the Window, the latter Amy Adams-starring “slow [Read More…]
Mank Arrives As A Sort of Elegy For What Screenwriting–Ergo Film–Used to Be
Although David Fincher couldn’t have known while in the long preproduction phase of Mank that a sinister disease called COVID-19 was brewing to help take [Read More…]
“LA Who Am I To Love You” Is The Norma Jeane Baker Explanation For the Inexplicable Pull to the City Where People Will Never Say “Damaged” Like It’s A Bad Thing
As Lana Del Rey begins to roll out the audio for her spoken word poetry album, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, while we await [Read More…]
