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In a revealing HBO documentary, the women involved with the groundbreaking feminist publication describe the rocky road to progress

The first of July marks the anniversary of Ms magazine’s official inaugural issue, which hit newsstands in 1972 and featured Wonder Woman on its cover, towering high above a city. Truthfully, Ms debuted months earlier, on 20 December 1971, as a 40-page insert in New York magazine, where founding editor Gloria Steinem was a staff writer. Suspecting this might be their only shot, its founders packed the issue with stories like The Black Family and Feminism, De-Sexing the English Language, and We Have Had Abortions, a list of 53 well-known American women’s signatures, including Anaïs Nin, Susan Sontag and Steinem herself. The 300,000 available copies sold out in eight days. The first US magazine founded and operated entirely by women was, naysayers be damned, a success.

The groundbreaking magazine’s history, and its impact...

Thirteen-year-old Jamie gets arrested and accused of the murder of a teenage girl who goes to his school. That is the premise of the new Netflix drama series Adolescence from U.K. producer Warp Films, based in Sheffield. Co-created by and starring Stephen Graham as Jamie’s father, along with Ashley Walters (Top Boy), Erin Doherty (The Crown), Christine Tremarco (The Responder) and others, the show was filmed in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England, and launched on the global streamer Thursday.

Reunion, a revenge thriller set in the deaf community in Sheffield, stars Matthew Gurney, Lara Peake, Anne-Marie Duff, Eddie Marsan and Rose Ayling-Ellis and will launch on the BBC this year. The bilingual series, featuring both British Sign Language (Bsl) and spoken English, similarly pushes the envelope with a deaf protagonist who tries to unravel the truth behind the events that led him to prison.

“We’ve always tried to...

You’ll almost certainly know Maria de Medeiros as the choppy-bobbed girlfriend, Fabienne, of Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction (1994). But what you might not know is what she’s been up to since — unless you’re a longtime European art house expert, in which case, maybe you do.

The Portuguese actress, now 59, returns to the Berlin Film Festival this year with Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Italian murder mystery (a genre referred to as giallo), Reflection in a Dead Diamond. The movie follows a retired spy — played by spaghetti Western icon Fabio Testi — residing in a luxurious hotel on the French Riviera. He becomes fascinated by his new neighbor, who rekindles memories of the Riviera’s vibrant days in the 1960s. But when his neighbor vanishes without a trace, Testi’s character is forced to confront his past demons.

Granted, de Medeiros is unable to attend Berlinale in person...

Nc-17 movies face stigma due to their mature content, but some have made an impact through artistic creativity and pushing boundaries. High-profile movies like American Psycho and Goodfellas had to alter or cut scenes to change their Nc-17 ratings to R, while others stood up against censorship. Streaming platforms have made it easier for audiences to enjoy Nc-17 movies, allowing them to appreciate the mature content and artistic value of these films.

Nc-17 movies have long fascinated audiences looking to test the limits of their comfort zone. Back in 1990, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) replaced the X rating with Nc-17 because X had become synonymous with pornography. Unfortunately, even when changed to Nc-17, the stigma of the rating still lingered and made it almost impossible to place these movies in theaters. However, the best-unrated movies have been able to make an impact through both mature content and artistic creativity.

Little Birds, based on Anaïs Nin's erotic writings, captures the exotic and erotic elements of 1950s Tangiers, highlighting the dangerous consequences of decadence and personal freedom. Despite mixed reviews, the show features stellar performances, especially from Juno Temple, and effectively tackles modern history through its lean storytelling and one-off drama format. Each episode of Little Birds is crucial to the ongoing plot, with episodes 4 and 5 being particularly intense as the characters face personal and political turmoil, leading to explosive and dramatic conclusions.

The Juno Temple-led series Little Birds packed a lot of steamy romance, intrigue, and style into its six-episode season, and the show had a lot more to say than what was on the surface. Based on the erotic writings of Anaïs Nin, the Sky original series sees young American socialite Lucy Savage (Juno Temple) travel to French-occupied Tangiers in the 1950s where she experiences the dangerous consequences of decadence and personal freedom.

“Time is all we have and every second that ticks away is one less second we’re alive,” Kenneth Anger told an interviewer from The Guardian 16 and a half years before his death this May at the age of 96. “The sands of time are going through the hourglass but it doesn’t frighten me.”

If Woody Allen’s Zelig was found rubbing elbows with the storied and famous of the ’20s and ’30s, starting in the 1950s Anger was for some decades more than a match for him. His legacy is poised between the pathbreaking cinematic auteur who made such avant-garde shorts as “Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome” (1954) and “Scorpio Rising” (1963) and the purveyor of at times fictionalized Hollywood scandal in the sensational and frequently updated “Hollywood Babylon” (1959).

He was not immune from his own brushes with dark history — the very bikers he incorporated in some of his middle-period work...

Jacqueline West is one of Hollywood’s most respected costume designers with four Oscar nominations for Philip Kaufmann’s Quills, David Fincher’s The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One.

She is also Terrence Malick’s go-to costume designer, after a recommendation from his long-time production designer Jack Fisk, working with him on The New World, The Tree of Life, To the Wonder and Knight of Cups, while other credits include Stephen Norrington’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Ben Affleck’s Argo and Martin Scorsese’s upcoming Killers Of The Flower Moon.

Talking about her career in a masterclass for the Doha Film Institute, West said she fell into cinema by chance after connecting with Kaufmann through a clothes store she set up in Berkeley in the 1990s after majoring in art history, having originally planned to study sciences.

Netflix’s new original Marilyn Monroe movie, Blonde, marks the streaming service’s first Nc-17 rated movie, due to its graphic depiction of sexual assault (as well as a point-of-view shot of a fetus in the womb). The Motion Picture Association’s most severe rating has long been known as a both a box office killer and a publicity gift, but this movie from director Andrew Dominik doesn’t have to worry about theater tickets.

Blonde will, after all, be seen primarily by people at home via Netflix, and the movie’s grim and gorgeously-shot story is shaping up to be a critical lightning rod, bringing it all sorts of added attention. But will it bring more prestige to the Nc-17 rating’s long and controversial legacy?

Below is a small collection of the most infamous—and therefore must-see—Nc-17 movies.

Henry & June (1991)

It’s fitting that the first film...

The Bureau has acquired 100 of Folamour’s shares.

French-uk production and sales outfit The Bureau has acquired French documentary production company Folamour.

The Bureau has acquired 100 of the shares of the company, in a deal confirmed by The Bureau group’s chief operating officer, Vincent Gadelle.

Folamour will operate as a subsidiary of The Bureau group, and continue to produce under the Folamour brand.

Folamour’s founding producer, Marie Genin, has retired from production. The rest of the team will remain and continue to work with The Bureau.

Paris-based Folamour was founded by Genin in 2001. It has produced over 40 titles...

March is Women’s History Month, so what better time to debut “Minx,” a new original series about the birth of a feminist-made nude male magazine?

“This country treats women like second-class citizens. We’re overlooked, underpaid, and overwhelmed,” proclaims would-be editor Joyce (a perfectly buttoned-up Ophelia Lovibond) during her pitch at the Southern California Magazine Pitch Festival. This was back when people actually wanted to print magazines: the 1970s. “We deserve a magazine that inspires us — that shows us how to fight.”

Vassar alum Joyce spends her days selling subscriptions to teen mags in a powder-pink cubicle while her leering boss gives his young female subordinates back rubs; meanwhile, she dreams of running her own message-driven glossy, “The Matriarchy Awakens” — a publication that would make her hero, Gloria Steinem, proud. Unfortunately, no crusty old magazine men are in the market for a feminist manifesto. Looking at the activist on the “Matriarchy” mock-up cover,...

Sophia Al-Maria is an artist and (screen)writer, probably most well-known for co-coining the term “Gulf Futurism” and authoring the memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth (2012). Since then, Al-Maria has directed gallery films and worked on numerous unrealized film and TV projects. Al-Maria’s exhibition “Virgin With A Memory” (2014) was a response to Beretta, a self-authored script meant to be her directorial debut. Her short film Beast Type Song (2019) is both an extension of an unmade post-colonial Sf project about “solar war” and a hang-out film with a slow, deliberate anger. Al-Maria created and wrote the majority of Little Birds, a six-episode […]

The post “People Think the Audience is Stupid”: Sophia Al-Maria on Little Birds, Anaïs Nin and Screenplay Development first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Sophia Al-Maria is an artist and (screen)writer, probably most well-known for co-coining the term “Gulf Futurism” and authoring the memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth (2012). Since then, Al-Maria has directed gallery films and worked on numerous unrealized film and TV projects. Al-Maria’s exhibition “Virgin With A Memory” (2014) was a response to Beretta, a self-authored script meant to be her directorial debut. Her short film Beast Type Song (2019) is both an extension of an unmade post-colonial Sf project about “solar war” and a hang-out film with a slow, deliberate anger. Al-Maria created and wrote the majority of Little Birds, a six-episode […]

The post “People Think the Audience is Stupid”: Sophia Al-Maria on Little Birds, Anaïs Nin and Screenplay Development first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

"Little Birds", the 6-episode Brit drama TV series inspired by Anaïs Nin's collection of erotic short stories, stars Juno Temple, airing June 6, 2021 on Starz:

"...'Little Birds' weaves stories of love and desire together with personal drama and political intrigue, set against a uniquely distinctive backdrop of hedonism and conflict.

"Tangier in 1955, at the famous ‘international zone’ outpost of colonial decadence, is a culture shock in more ways than one for troubled American debutante 'Lucy Savage' (Temple), who desires an unconventional life free from the societal cage she's been kept in.

"Along with Tangier itself, Lucy finds herself on the cusp of achieving a painful yet necessary independence..."

Click the images to enlarge...

What will moviegoing look like post-vaccine? We might soon have a better idea. Where May served as something of a dry run for whether or not audiences turn out via films like Wrath of Man and A Quiet Place Part II, June looks like the main event thanks to In the Heights, F9, and a new Pixar movie. Wait… the Pixar movie is premiering on Disney+? Maybe we won’t know what post-pandemic moviegoing will look like for a while after all.

Still, there’s plenty to watch on big screens big and small.

Flying into a deeply erotic world. On Wednesday, April 28, Starz released a sexy new trailer for their upcoming limited series, titled Little Birds. The drama series, which is based off Anaïs Nin's collection of erotic short stories of the same name, will premiere June 6 on Starz. And, as the new trailer below teases, the upcoming series may be just as infamous as Nin's original stories. "Home or abroad, wherever you go, my patent-pending medicine will free you from troublesome behaviors and distracting wants," a doctor informs the series' lead Lucy Savage (Juno Temple). "The life you should be leading can finally begin." As footage shows Lucy marrying a dashing young man...

Who knew that if you needed a sexual awakening, all you had to do is get involved in a terrible, loveless marriage and then move to Tangier? Apparently, while there, you’re going to have your mind blown through sexual exploration and discovery. At least, that’s what I learned in the new trailer for “Little Birds.”

Read More: ‘Physical’ Teaser Trailer: Rose Byrne Goes From Housewife To Aerobic Fitness Guru In New AppleTV+ Show

As seen in the footage, “Little Birds” follows a newly married woman that travels to Tangier to be with her husband.

Continue reading ‘Little Birds’ Trailer: Juno Temple Stars In An Starz Series Based On Anaïs Nin’s Erotic Stories at The Playlist.

HBO Max has released a trailer for “Hacks,” an original series debuting on May 13.

The ten-episode season follows the dark relationship between a legendary Las Vegas comedian and an entitled, outcast 25-year-old.

Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder star alongside Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Kaitlin Olson, Christopher McDonald, Paul W. Downs, Mark Indelicato, Poppy Liu, Johnny Sibilly, Meg Stalter and Rose Abdoo.

“Hacks” is created and showrun by Downs, Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky. Downs, Aniello and Statsky executive produce alongside Michael Schur, David Miner and Morgan Sackett. The studio is Universal Television.

Also in today’s TV news roundup:

Dates

Oprah Winfrey and Apple TV Plus have announced that Elliot Page will be featured on the next episode of “The Oprah Conversation,” debuting April 30. “The Oprah Conversation: Elliot Page” will present a deeply honest conversation with the actor, producer and lifelong social justice advocate. In a time when the rights of transgender...

Writer-producer Francesca Sloane has signed an overall deal with Amazon Studios and set her first project, a series based on the works of Anaïs Nin. Under the pact, Sloane will create content to premiere exclusively on Amazon Prime Video in more than 240 countries and territories worldwide.

As part of Sloane’s deal, Amazon Studios is developing A Spy in the House of Love, a half-hour series based on the groundbreaking works of erotica’s founding mother Nin, from Legendary Television. Sloane will serve as writer and executive producer.

The contemporary series, a frank countermeasure to the male gaze, follows Sabina – young, French and newly transplanted in New York – on a provocative journey to self-discovery. Sabina secretly juggles vastly disparate lovers while unveiling her multifaceted (and at times contradicting) nature.

Amy Lippman and Brandon Milbradt also serve as executive producers.

“Francesca is part of a generation of bold, exciting...

Inspired by short stories created by Anaïs Nin, gripping new drama Little Birds is out on DVD on 14th September and we have 2 copies to give away! Starring Juno Temple and Hugh Skinner it tells the tale of two very different women whose lives – and those of their lovers – become dangerously entangled in Tangier’s ‘International Zone’.

It’s 1955, and American heiress Lucy Savage (Juno Temple) is newly arrived in Tangier, one of the last outposts of colonial decadence. Whilst Lucy is navigating the sexual and political tensions of her new surroundings, her fiancé, Hugo Cavendish-Smyth (Hugh Skinner) is torn between his duty to Lucy and his lover Adham Abaza (Raphael Acloque), the most eligible man in Tangier. Meanwhile, Cherifa Lamour (Yumna Marwan), a Moroccan dominatrix and local celebrity, enraptures Secretary Pierre Vaney (Jean-Marc Barr), who has fallen desperately in love with her. As Lucy and Cherifa struggle to find...

It’s common for channels to make hyperbolic claims when introducing a new show, but when Sky’s drama heads describe Little Birds as ‘not like anything else on telly,’ they’re not wrong.

The drama’s six 45-minute episodes inspired by a series of erotic short stories combine to form a lavish period melodrama with few points of TV comparison. Little Birds is an exploration of female sensuality and liberation set against a backdrop of colonial violence and simmering rebellion. It’s a provocative, heightened, almost cartoonish fairy tale about struggles for personal and political independence. It’s colourful and stylised, tongue-in-cheek yet earnest, with a killer 1950s soundtrack.

Take a look at the trailer:

If that appealed, then here’s everything you need to know:

Where was it filmed?

Little Birds was largely filmed in summer 2019 in the Spanish town of Tarifa, on the southernmost tip of Spanish Andalusia,...

When asked why he wanted to record new versions of songs his band June of 44 first released more than two decades ago — on their final proper studio LP, 1999’s Anahata — guitarist-vocalist Jeff Mueller gives a simple answer: He’d never really felt like they were finished in the first place.

“The session for Anahata was pretty tough; many of the songs felt underdeveloped,” Mueller writes in an email. “Speaking for myself … it all just felt rushed and messy — I had very little grasp on how to organize and play my parts.

“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are,” goes author Anaïs Nin’s frequently cited quote on human subjectivity. However overused, few summations could articulate the idea at the heart of Israeli filmmaker Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s provocative non-fiction effort “The Viewing Booth” this precisely.

Capturing a viewer’s visceral and verbal responses to a series of short videos — all portraying devastating facets of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation — Alexandrowicz sets out to investigate what happens behind the eye of the beholder, while posing numerous queries as a result: Do we bring our own beliefs to what we watch? Is truth open to interpretation even if it’s supported by unassailable evidence? Does documentary film possess the power of changing hearts and minds for the better?

While these are hardly groundbreaking questions, asking and learning from them is perhaps more vital than it’s ever...

Paris — “Narcos” showrunner Chris Brancato and “Godfather of Harlem” star Giancarlo Esposito, actors Carole Bouquet and Zabou Breitman, and the cast and crew behind the Canal Plus series “The Bureau” will be among the many guest of honor at this year’s Series Mania, which will kick off its 11th edition on March 20.

Returning to the north-eastern French city of Lille, Series Mania will once again offer a broad cross-section of international scripted dramas, with a selection culled from 25 different countries including Chile, Peru, Niger, Senegal and South Korea, alongside high profile productions from the U.S., the U.K. and France.

Among the 38 productions world premiering in Lille, the BBC/Tvnz literary adaption “The Luminaries,” with Eva Green, will play as opening series while the closer remains unannounced.

Once again, Netflix makes a strong showing this year. Beyond bringing the cast and crew of their Paris-set drama “The Eddy,...

Josh Brolin is hitting back at a fan who had a problem with his racy Instagram post of his wife.

The actor, 51, shared a photo of Kathryn Boyd wearing lingerie on his Instagram account on Tuesday with the caption, “I want to love you wildly. I don’t want words, but inarticulate cries, meaningless, from the bottom of my most primitive being, that flow from my belly like honey. A piercing joy, that leaves me empty, conquered, silenced. Anaïs Nin @kathrynbrolin.”

In the comments, a fan wrote, “Why show your wife’s body off on the internet it’s not good,...

Ask folks in Hollywood what they think of the Motion Picture Association of America’s Classification & Ratings Administration (Cara), and you’ll get an earful. Filmmakers have become so sophisticated about the vagaries of the ratings board (one F-word per PG-13 movie) that they often manipulate the process by adding footage they’re willing to lose later in order to get what they want into their final cut.

And over the decades, ace marketers have followed the game plan perfected by Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein when he publicized battles with the ratings board just to get exposure for movies like “Scandal,” “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” “Clerks,” “Kids,” and “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

But while filmmakers get exorcised over the board’s many myopic decisions over sex and violence and issues like the studios getting away with more than the indies, MPAA president Jack Valenti had valid and urgent...

"I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic -- in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself." (March 25, 1933)

Anaïs Nin (21 Feb. 1903 - 14 Jan. 1977), French-born author.

Executive producer Brandon Milbradt has optioned 50 short stories from erotica novelist Anaïs Nin’s including the collections: Delta of Venus, Waste of Timelessness, Under A Glass Bell, and Cities of the Interior— Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur. Tree L. Wright, the author's rep at the Anaïs Nin Trust, stated "We were looking for a partner who could do justice to Anaïs’s…...

Há Terra!I want to apologize for providing this Wavelengths avant-garde preview a little later than I might've liked. Hell, given that it's been over a week since movies died, I'm not exactly sure how much more kindling I can chuck onto the pyre. But I should remark that compared with previous years' iterations of the Tiff Wavelengths series, 2016 does feel a bit...off. I'm chiefly referring to the experimental short films here. (My second part, addressing the Wavelengths features, will be along in a matter of days.) Make no mistake. There's plenty of great work in this year's programs. But I do feel that the disparity this year between the truly exceptional films and the mediocre-to-not-very-good ones is markedly high.I enjoy films, and more than this, I enjoy enjoying them. I hardly get my kicks by being a nattering nabob of negativity. But programmers have to work with what is available to them,...

Red Oaks, one of the new Amazon Studios pilots now available to watch, is executive produced by Steven Soderbergh, but it’s certainly nothing like his current airing television project, the dark early-20th-century medical drama The Knick. Though Red Oaks could sound like a similarly bloody affair, Soderbergh’s never been one to stick to a genre, and the show is a small scale comedy named for a country club in New Jersey where the hero, David, gets a gig as a tennis pro one summer in the ’80s. There’s potential within Red Oaks if Amazon does decide...

In The Fault in Our Stars, Hazel is obsessed with an Infinite Jest–like book called An Imperial Affliction, to the point where she is desperately trying to find out from its author, Peter Van Houten, what happens to the characters after the book ends abruptly mid-sentence. She even goes to Amsterdam to seek this out. What kind of books and authors inspire this level of dedication for Fault's own cast? For Shailene Woodley, it's Anaïs Nin. At the Gotham Awards, the actress told Vulture she had started reading Henry and June, the unexpurgated diary of Nin's affair with Henry Miller and his wife June. Woodley then declared, "Anaïs is like the ultimate goddess. I feel really connected to her femininity." And six months later, at last night's premiere of The Fault in Our Stars hosted by InStyle and Physicians Formula, Woodley was still in love. When asked if she...

'What extinct thing would I bring back to life? Female facial hair and tails'

Björk Guðmundsdóttir, 47, was born in Iceland. She began singing professionally at the age of 11, releasing her first album in 1977. After her band the Sugarcubes broke up in 1992, she moved to London, where she released her solo albums Debut and Post. In 2000 she won Best Actress at Cannes for her role in Lars von Trier's film Dancer In The Dark. Since 2010 she has been working on Biophilia, which encompasses an album, a live show and an educational programme. On 3 September she brings Biophilia to London's Alexandra Palace. She has two children and lives in Iceland.

When were you happiest?

Merging with nature or merging with people.

What is your greatest fear?

Not merging, running out of energy to merge…

What is your earliest memory?

Being driven to kindergarten by my grandfather. Helping the caretakers there hand out slices of rye bread,...

The strength of anti-abortion feeling in the Us makes it important that celebrities join campaigners in taking a stand

It would have been so much easier to say nothing. The actor Mark Ruffalo clearly knew this when he put together his statement of support for a pro-choice campaign currently traversing the Us – but he went ahead anyway. On Saturday, outside the last abortion clinic in Mississippi (back in 1981 the state had 14 clinics), his speech was read aloud. It spoke of the abortion his mother had had to seek illegally as a young woman, a traumatising experience, "shameful and sleazy and demeaning," he wrote. "I don't want to turn back the hands of time to when women shuttled across state lines in the thick of night to resolve an unwanted pregnancy, in a cheap hotel room." He urged others to find their voice too, "and let it be known that you...

The book series that won't go away. Whether shock, excitement or simply curiosity, it seems that everyone has a strong reaction to the bestselling erotic book trilogy that includes Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. From the first book: "My insides practically contort with potent, needy, liquid desire.Desire . acute, liquid and smoldering, combusts deep in my belly..." - Anastasia Steele in a fit of passion or a colitis attack. "Christian squirts baby oil into his hand and then rubs my behind with careful tenderness . from makeup remover to soothing balm for a spanked ass, who would have thought it such a versatile liquid..." - Anastasia Steele Good lord. Anaïs Nin is...

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Happy day-after-Halloween, everyone. I hope you are nursing a respectable hangover with a nice hot cup of tea. Maybe not too hot though, because I’d hate for you to scald yourself in terror at this episode. (For serious, if you are easily traumatized and a discussion of Another rape scene is going to wreck your day, maybe you should just eat your leftover candy and watch Amelie or something.)

Still here? Then come with me back to the gory 21st century, where despite being stabbed five times, Adam Levine is still alive. Dammit.

I mean, “yaaaay,” or whatever.

He leaps to his wife’s rescue and pulls Bloodyface off her in spite of his truly miniscule size, now exacerbated by loss of arm/blood. Once free, the lady (still no name) grabs Bloodyface’s lobotomizer and stabs him in his chest like infinity times,...

Novelist, playwright and essayist with a complete mastery of the scene he described

Gore Vidal, the American writer, controversialist and politician manqué, who has died aged 86, was celebrated both for his caustic wit and his mandarin's poise. His public career spanned seven decades and included 25 novels, numerous collections of essays on literature and politics, a volume of short stories, five Broadway plays, dozens of television plays and film scripts, and even three mystery novels written under the pseudonym Edgar Box. After 9/11 and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, he returned to centre stage with a series of blistering pamphlets and public pronouncements that led many, including his former friend Christopher Hitchens, to pounce on him. But Vidal never looked back.

Despite his output as a novelist and playwright, many critics considered Vidal's witty and acerbic essays his best work. Often published first in such journals as the New York Review...

First things first. There's an announcement from last week to catch up with: "Aldo Tambellini's Black Films and pioneering experimental works by four other filmmakers — Ian Hugo, the international banker-turned-artist who worked with Anaïs Nin; Mike Kuchar; Gregory Markopoulos; and Jud Yalkut — will soon be saved through the 2012 Avant-Garde Masters Grants from the National Film Preservation Foundation and The Film Foundation." Martin Scorsese, who began the initiative in 2003 through seed money from The Film Foundation: "There's no other program of its kind. I'm thrilled that the work of such artists as George Kuchar, Shirley Clark, and Kenneth Anger has been preserved and — equally important — made available so audiences can actually see these extraordinary films."

On a somewhat related note, Marilyn Ferdinand has put out a call regarding For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, taking place in just a couple of weeks now: "Bloggers, we need to...

This weekend sees the release of Jennifer Westfeldt's "Friends with Kids," and thanks to a cast of your favorite stars -- Adam Scott, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolf and Jon Hamm -- the film seems destined for indie box office success. The film follows two platonic besties (Westfeldt and Scott) who try to outsmart the system by having a baby and then look for love elsewhere. Despite following classic romcom tropes a la "When Harry Met Sally" -- whose 1989 tag line was "Can two friends sleep together and still love each other in the morning?" -- the film is being praised for its decidedly different approach to love and friendships. And in addition to the film being Westfeltd's long-awaited return to romcom glory, the dramedy also marks the 11-year screen reunion of Hollywood's favorite high/low couple: Westfeldt and Hamm. In 2001, when Westfeldt's first project "Kissing Jessica Stein" hit theaters,...

Film director Zalman King has died at the age of 69, and I'm sad to report the world got just a little less sexy with his passing.

I really can't claim to be a longtime fan of Mr. King. In fact, the first time I heard his name, it was in connection with the film 9½ Weeks, which he produced and is a movie I less than affectionately refer to as a perfume ad for date rape. This is not because it involved consensual bondage with a dominant male; rather, because it offered up several sequences in which the heroine did not know or consent to everything that was happening to her. Yep folks, it doesn't matter how sexy the lead actor is or how smoky the jazz music is that's playing in the background, lack of consent is lack of consent. So while the film's soundtrack (featuring songs by my idol John Taylor from Duran Duran,...

Sherilyn Fenn, Richard Tyson, Two Moon Junction Zalman King Dies Pt.1: Mickey Rourke-Kim Basinger Sex Drama Nine 1/2 Weeks Though much of the media coverage on the film focused on the Sherilyn Fenn-Richard Tyson sex scenes and a full-frontal nude shot of Fenn, the most interesting aspect of Two Moon Junction was its highly eclectic cast, which included Oscar winners Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and Burl Ives (The Big Country), Oscar nominee Juanita Moore (Imitation of Life), plus Little Darlings' Kristy McNichol, The Diary of Anne Frank's Millie Perkins, Fantasy Island's Hervé Villechaize, Endless Love's Martin Hewitt, TV star Don Galloway, and Milla Jovovich of the future Resident Alien movies. But despite the cast and the sex, Two Moon Junction bombed domestically, earning a paltry $1.54 million. Compared to Two Moon Junction, the $7 million-budgeted Wild Orchid (1990) was a megahit.

It’s easy to see why Philip Kaufman’s 1990 film, Henry & June, which chronicle’s Anaïs Nin’s love triangle with writer Henry Miller and his wife June, sparked so much controversy. The fear of sex, especially gay sex, was written all over the MPAA’s decision to rate the film “X.” The film’s only major crime, however, was the exploitation of actress Maria de Medeiros’ large, oval eyes and the overuse of prolonged, meaningful looks between her and everyone she came across. Many in the film industry agreed that Henry & June didn’t deserve such a harsh rating, so, hot on the heels of Tie me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, the film proved to be the last straw.

The ratings battle earlier that year over Tie Me Up! had instigated an open letter to the president of the MPAA,...

Actor whose 1940s heyday featured two films as co-star to James Mason

The 1940s was a ripe period for women in British films, when stars such as Margaret Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert, Valerie Hobson and Jean Simmons had a chance to shine. Although Joyce Howard, who has died aged 88, was never in their league, she had her moments of glory in a relatively short career which lasted from 1941 to 1950. Howard's high spots were the two films in which she co-starred with the up-and-coming matinee idol James Mason: The Night Has Eyes (1942) and They Met in the Dark (1943).

Howard was the ideal foil for the saturnine Mason. In the former film, she is the vulnerable, repressed heroine whose passions are aroused by Mason's brooding, secretive composer, the kind of relationship so beloved of wartime British melodramas. The film, directed by Leslie Arliss, creates a pervasive sense of danger, with the characters...

Jeremy Wood is doing something only the most enthusiastic suburbanites ever thought possible: He is elevating lawn-mowing to a work of art.

Jeremy Wood is doing something only the most enthusiastic suburbanites ever thought possible: He is elevating lawn-mowing to a work of art.

Variously over the past nine years, the artist has tooled around on a motorized lawnmower, tracking his rides on Gps as he dutifully clips the grass at his mom's place in Oxfordshire, England. (What a good son!) The data is then turned into maps. They look like beautiful Etch A Sketch drawings or, if you want to get art-nerdish, Cy Twombly scribbles, even though they're basically just visual travel logs from the world's most boring vacation.

Here he is mowing the lawn in different seasons. From left to right: spring, summer, autumn, winter:

And here, he's cutting the grass over several months in the fall:

Was...

I first learned of Luise Rainer--as with so many other of the creative individuals of her generation--through the diaries of Anaïs Nin. If I recall correctly, they befriended each other about the time that Rainer was separating from her first husband playwright Clifford Odets and what sticks in my memory is Nin's descriptions of Rainer's suffering at the time, especially one episode where she sat on the steps of her home painfully enunciating the word "masochism", which lends credence to the ascription by film historian Emanuel Lefy that Luise Rainer was the "most extreme case of an Oscar® victim in Hollywood mythology" (All About Oscar: The History and Politics of the Academy Awards, Continuum International Publ. 2003, p. 314). It wasn't until years later that I caught Rainer's Oscar®-winning performance as the Chinese peasant woman O-lan in The Good Earth (1937), which came offered to participants at the first-ever TCM Classic...

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent film classic The Passion of Joan of Arc is a renowned masterpiece whose rescue from obscurity is the stuff of legend. Long thought to have been lost to fire, the original version was miraculously found in perfect condition in 1981—in a Norwegian mental institution. I first heard of the film through the diaries of Anaïs Nin in her compassionate written portrait of Antonin Artaud, who portrayed the monk Massieu. Long interested in Artaud, I welcomed the opportunity to view the film when it achieved a digital restoration for its Criterion DVD release.

The film details the last hours of Joan of Arc after she has been captured by the English. Her trial, imprisonment, torture and final execution are rendered similarly to a passion play, particularly through Dreyer’s facial close-ups, effected through the use of recently-developed panchromatic film. Renée Jeanne Falconetti (aka “Maria” Falconetti) was...