From the same wicked awesome site that brought you the totally unofficial Ren and Stimpy soundtrack, Kirk Demarais gets nostalgic, drawing family portraits of cult-famous families of the last three decades. Take a stroll down memory lane with the Torrances, the Lundegaardes, the Griswolds, and other infamous families. [more inside]
posted by Blazecock Pileon on Sep 9, 2009 - 5 comments

Stanislav Szukalski was born in Warta, Poland on December 13, 1893. When he was only six years old, a teacher sent him to the headmaster's office for whittling a pencil. The headmaster examined the pencil more closely and discovered that young Stanislav had carved a tiny, near-perfect figure. [more inside]
posted by louche mustachio on Jan 23, 2008 - 8 comments

Crazy 4 Cult is a new exhibit coming to Gallery 1988, the Los Angeles art gallery that hosts the annual (and always great) IAm8Bit exhibit. Just as IAm8Bit uses videogames of the 1980s as the theme for the artists, Crazy 4 Cult is using Cult movies. For fun, the exhbit poster features a huge number of movie references - can you catch them all? Via.
posted by jonson on Jul 16, 2007 - 12 comments

Drama is impossible today. I don't know of any. Drama used to be the belief in guilt, and in a higher order. This absolutely cruel didactic is impossible, unacceptable for us moderns. But melodrama has kept it. You are caged. In melodrama you have human, earthly prisons rather than godly creations. Every Greek tragedy ends with the chorus — "those are strange happenings. Those are the ways of the gods". And so it always is in melodrama.
His career as a film director lasted more than 40 years, but Douglas Sirk (1900-1987) is remembered for the melodramas he made for Universal in Hollywood between 1954 and 1959, his "divine wallow": Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1958, William Faulkner considered it the best screen adaptation of one of his novels), Imitation of Life (1959) -- all considered for decades little more than a camp oddity. Now audiences are beginning to look deeper at the films of Douglas Sirk, at how, in megafan Todd Haynes' words, they are "almost spookily accurate about the emotional truths". Now, lucky Chicagoans can enjoy "Douglas Sirk at Universal", matinees at the Music Box. More inside.
posted by matteo on Apr 29, 2006 - 14 comments

In search of lost time It was Jack Kerouac who first defined Robert Frank's genius, who found in it some echo of his own vision of a vast, broken-down, but still epic, America, peopled with restless and lonely dreamers. 'Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice,' wrote Kerouac in his now famous introduction to Frank's collection The Americans , 'with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America on to film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world'.
Frank's exhibition, Storylines, opens this week at the Tate Modern in London.
posted by matteo on Oct 27, 2004 - 6 comments

These people make for some "Interesting Motherfuckers."
posted by the biscuit man on Nov 28, 2003 - 17 comments