This is my all-time favorite SCTV sketch – a pastiche of Ingmar Bergman and Jerry Lewis, with Andrea Martin as Harriet Andersson and Martin Short (brilliant) as Lewis. Clearly, whoever wrote and directed this sketch studied both Bergman and Lewis in great detail. Bergman aficionados will note the barren landscape accompanied by mournful cello music ... read more »

Erich Kuersten’s Xmas homage to The Bad Seed reminds me of one of my favorite character actors, the utterly unique Henry Jones (1912-1999) who made his film debut playing the retarded-but-cunning (?!?) janitor Leroy in that film, a role that he had created on stage. Jones’s Leroy (above) is the only character in The Bad ... read more »

Last week’s Action Heroine Blog-a-Thon was quite enlightening in that it underlined how few action heroines there actually were in the movies prior to the late 1970s. The apparent tipping point was Sigourney Weaver’s debut as Ripley in 1979′s Alien. Which isn’t to say there were NO action heroines prior to the 1970s. Joining Kriemhild ... read more »

Now that Anna Nicole Smith is deceased and the paternity of her baby has been resolved, Camille “Sexual Personae” Paglia is hailing her as a “populist heroine” (here and here). Paglia compares Smith to Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Anita Ekberg, regretting that today’s Hollywood couldn’t have made better use of what Paglia sees as ... read more »

I managed to catch three new films this weekend, one a “docu-comedy,” the other two, biopics, none of the three having much to do with one another except that all three were structured around one of the most basic and commonly used screenwriting tropes, the “fish out of water.” BoratIn Borat: Cultural Learnings of America ... read more »