I mean, DAME Helen Mirren.  (Photo via Associated Press.  Joke via Oscar co-host, Steve Martin.) Very happy for Kat B and The Hurt Locker. Worst Award of the Evening -  The Best Cinematography Award to Avatar.  It should have gone to the great Robert Richardson (Inglourious Basterds), or if not to him, to Christian Berger who was ... read more »

Shed a tear for the creator of gentle Gumby. Art Clokey was a disciple of avant-garde film theorist, Slavko Vorkapich, under whose mentorship Clokey filmed Gumbasia (above) and other experimental works. Producer Samuel G. Engel saw and admired Gumbasia’s “claymation,” which led to Clokey’s creation of The Adventures of Gumby as an antidote to the ... read more »

Every one of Henry Selick’s four feature films to date has dealt with alternate realities. In the Tim Burton-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the ghoulish Jack Skellington finds a hole in a tree that leads him, Alice-style, from his own reality, Halloween Town, to the very different alt-reality of Christmas Town. In James and ... read more »

There was Alice, who journeyed to Wonderland and through the looking glass, Dorothy Gale, who was carried on a cyclone to Oz, and Wendy Darling, who accompanied lost boy Peter Pan to Neverland. All three meet as adult women in Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s X-rated graphic novel, Lost Girls (above). Moore, the genius author ... read more »