I'm too busy to look at this right now

May 14, 2010

oldhollywood:

Barbara Stanwyck & her favorite self-help manual in Babyface (1933, dir. Alfred E. Green)
“For decades, “Baby Face” — the 1933 film starring Barbara Stanwyck — has been pre-Code 101. If you want to turn someone onto pre-censorship movies at their most fun, sleazy and outrageous, just take them to “Baby Face,” and from there they’ll be inspired to explore the whole era. “If you’ve never seen Stanwyck in a pre-Code film, you’ve never really seen Stanwyck. Never in her later career, including “Double Indemnity,” was she ever as hard-boiled as she was in the early 1930s. She had a wonderful quality of being both incredibly cool and yet blazingly passionate. Her cynicism was profound, and then, without warning, she would explode into shrieking, sobbing, saliva-spraying hurt and rage. What an indelible, one-of-a-kind talent.”
-excerpted from Mick LaSalle’s review of the restored version of Babyface, which features additional scenes that were cut to get it past the censor boards
The uncut version of the film can be seen online here.

Barbara Stanwyck & her favorite self-help manual in Babyface (1933, dir. Alfred E. Green)

“For decades, “Baby Face” — the 1933 film starring Barbara Stanwyck — has been pre-Code 101. If you want to turn someone onto pre-censorship movies at their most fun, sleazy and outrageous, just take them to “Baby Face,” and from there they’ll be inspired to explore the whole era.

“If you’ve never seen Stanwyck in a pre-Code film, you’ve never really seen Stanwyck. Never in her later career, including “Double Indemnity,” was she ever as hard-boiled as she was in the early 1930s. She had a wonderful quality of being both incredibly cool and yet blazingly passionate. Her cynicism was profound, and then, without warning, she would explode into shrieking, sobbing, saliva-spraying hurt and rage. What an indelible, one-of-a-kind talent.”

-excerpted from Mick LaSalle’s review of the restored version of Babyface, which features additional scenes that were cut to get it past the censor boards

The uncut version of the film can be seen online here.

1:17pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZqdNLyZhF1a

(Notes: 84)

May 14, 2010

oldhollywood:

Stills from La Jetée (1962, dir. Chris Marker)

“La Jetee’s fans insist that it’s the finest science fiction film ever made, and why not? It’s truly unique, implementing a series of hundreds of unmoving pictures, beautifully edited together to tell a mind-bending story of time travel that doubles as a melancholy fable about memory, loss, childhood, and destiny. Only for a moment is there any action on screen (besides the implied action in the cuts from shot to shot), and that motion is one of the cinema’s most profound. It’s no exaggeration, finally, to say that La Jetée may represent film’s closest approach to poetry.”

-Bryant Frazer, Deep Focus

The 26-minute film, which inspired Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995), tells the story of post-apocalyptic, nuclear war-ravaged Paris, where underground commanders run time travel experiments on prisoners. The film can be seen here.