May 29, 2020
In this Fox 1932 episode of Studios Year by Year, Fox Film Corporation finds its voice despite behind-the-scenes upheaval, and we offer the name “humanism” for that voice. Termite art classic For Me and My Gal (Raoul Walsh), a loose and leisurely proto-screwball comedy, stars Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett as a pair...
May 22, 2020
We devote some meta-theorizing to Setsuko Hara's screen persona and its reception and look at two of her lesser-known films that are available with English subtitles, Kōzaburō Yoshimura's A Ball at the Anjo House (1947), and the very uncharacteristic A Woman in the Typhoon Area (1948, directed by Hideo Ôba), in which...
May 17, 2020
Hello!
Your cozy co-hosts spent part of their 7th Anniversary yesterday charting the 'cast's course well into the early years of the Quarring Twenties.
See the results below (and, as always, if you need help finding any of these, don't hesitate to write us at therebuggy@gmail.com)
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May 22, 2020: Acteurist...
May 15, 2020
This week we talk French Melville—no, not Jean-Pierre, but two temperamentally polar 1999 films by French auteurs based on works by Herman: Claire Denis's Beau Travail and Leos Carax's Pola X, based respectively on Billy Budd, Sailor and Pierre, or the Ambiguities. We ask such questions as: Why fascist aesthetics? Why...
May 9, 2020
In this week's Studios Year by Year episode, another studio finds its voice in 1932: Warner Bros. gives us the consciousness-raising prison drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (dir. Mervyn LeRoy) as well as the weird little maternity ward movie Life Begins (dir. James Flood). They share a harrowing vision of life...