Jack Smith in Star Spangled to Death (ca 1958)

 NOT TO MENTION DOGGED SELF-AGGREGATION!!!

Although sporadic updates may be found in “Events”, necessary modifications and relevant additions have and will accrue to “Biography,” Das Blog mainly serves to link to material published in other venues, with new stuff featured on “The Home Page” [see below]

On The Dictator [Tablet]

Tasteless but by no means mindless, Sacha Baron Cohen is the most incendiary Jewish performance artist since Lenny Bruce. (You were thinking Jackie Mason?) Although his personal ideology would seem to be some form of left Zionism, his vaudeville travesties and gross-out pranks outrage nationalists of all persuasions and moralizers across the political spectrum. Read more…

On The Avengers and 9/11 [Guardian]

Mad terror in the streets as flying whatsits and killer robots from outer space ricochet off and, more often, crash through 70-story skyscrapers. Mighty towers crumble; concrete chunks spray from the screen. Total Sensurround: the theatre itself shakes as the non-stop cosmic battle-cum-pinball game that is The Avengers reaches its climax in a digital midtown Manhattan. Read more…

On The Connection, Play and Movie [NYRBlog]

Re-released in a lovingly restored print on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, Shirley Clarke’s debut film The Connection is an excavated relic of an earlier New York. Read more…

On Luis Buñuel [The Nation]

With regard to longevity and productivity, not to mention talent, the only peers of the great Spanish director Luis Buñuel (1900–83) are his contemporaries Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock. The old Surrealist was, however, a far slyer fox.  Read more…

 

RECENT REVIEWS: Bonsái . Dark Shadows . Celine and Julie Go Boating . Bernie .  The Devil, Probably . Post Mortem . The Three Stooges. Keyhole . Damsels in Distress . Artificial Paradises . The Hunger Games . Kid on a Bike. Footnote.

PRINT ONLY:  “In Praise of Da Pasta,” Film Comment (May-June); On Mad magazine’s imitators, Artforum (May);  “Across the Movie-verse,” Film Comment (March-April)