More Like December –There’s a great moment in Sirk on Sirk, Jon Halliday’s interview book with Douglas Sirk, the most important filmmaker ever to helm a film melodrama, about the director’s last American film, his masterpiece, Imitation of Life (1959). Sirk describes Annie (Juanita Moore), the African-American woman ignored by Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), the ...

Trifling News Radio Since at least the Gilligan’s Island episode, “Diogenes, Won’t You Please Come Home?” (1965), the American sitcom has been using the framework of Akira Kurosawa’s modernist masterpiece, Rashomon (1950) to explore how various members of an ensemble cast respond selfishly to the same event. In an informatively complex example of this, a ...

Altered State There’s a terrific scene early in Nebraska, Alexander Payne’s wonderful new film, where a son and his elderly father on a road trip from Billings, Montana to Omaha, Nebraska stop at Mount Rushmore. At first, the dad, Woody Grant (played by Bruce Dern) doesn’t respond positively when his son David (played by Will ...