Glengarry Glen Ross endures mainly as a spectacular display of verbal warfare and alpha-male gamesmanship. There’s a musical quality to it, with a great composer and a great chorus hitting the complicated runs of broken dialogue and solos that weave into profane poetry and nuggets of philosophical wisdom. Perhaps the greatest sign of the movie’s success, owed equally to Mamet’s script and this cast, is that it does a great sales job in itself, convincing us that there’s nobility to men who lie for a living — a bill of goods we’re all too happy to buy. [more inside]
posted by Trurl on Sep 29, 2011 - 67 comments

It was not easy to get Terence Malick to direct again, as this article about the making of "The Thin Red Line" from Vanity Fair shows.
posted by reenum on Jan 24, 2011 - 27 comments

Christoph Schlingensief is dead. [more inside]
posted by Glow Bucket on Aug 21, 2010 - 4 comments

Gravelly-voiced character actor James Gammon has passed away of cancer at the age of 70. His career spanned more than 50 years in television, (with roles from "Gunsmoke" to "Grays Anatomy",) film and theater, but most will probably remember him as either the cantankerous manager of the Cleveland Indians in the 1989 comedy "Major League" or as Don Johnson's crotchety, retired longshoreman father on the television show Nash Bridges. [more inside]
posted by zarq on Jul 18, 2010 - 23 comments

Been to your local cineplex lately and seen IMAX Digital on the menu? Been tempted to pay the extra $5 or so for the expected 7-story screen and mammoth sound? [more inside]
posted by hippybear on May 12, 2009 - 85 comments

Attending a show? You will, of course, be on time. You will not talk (or poke your fellow theatergoers). You will not use your cell phone. You will not bring your own food. You will not fight. You will not riot.

Audiences weren't always so sedate. Roman audiences were notoriously drunk. Shakespeare's groundlings were famously rambunctious. Victorian theater were hotbeds of prostitution. Indeed, it isn't until P.T. Barnam opened a lecture hall in his American Museum that "museum" standards of behavior became applied to audiences for live entertainment, and it never completely stuck (see Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford's wonderful Sleazoid Express for fascinating descriptions of the lively audiences found at Times Square's grindhouse theaters). But, for the most part, theater and moviegoing is now a civil, dignified undertaking. How did this happen?

Well, it all started one day in 1849.
posted by Astro Zombie on Feb 19, 2006 - 26 comments