Dunkirk: The Real Story

Posted on July 18, 2017 at 10:02 pm

Dunkirk was in most ways a loss, the Allies driven by the enemy to the shore and trapped there to be picked off. But it became a moral and morale victory that has resonated for nearly seventy years. It is featured in two films this year. “Their Finest” depicts a fictionalized version of the WWII propaganda operation that selected the rescue at Dunkirk as ideal for reassuring the British civilians. And Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” is a gorgeously filmed re-telling that is grand in scope but intimate in focus. While some of the details and characters are imagined, the overall story is true.

To learn more about the real story of the heroic evacuation of more than 300,000 men, watch some of the documentaries about the rescue operation.

And read The Miracle of Dunkirk by Walter Lord.

Here is then-new Prime Minister Winston Churchill giving one of the most famous speeches of the 20th century after Dunkirk.

Never surrender!

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The Real Story

Tribute: Martin Landau

Posted on July 18, 2017 at 3:57 pm

We mourn the loss of Oscar-winning actor Martin Landau, who died on July 16, 2017 at age 89. His career goes back to the legendary years of the Actors Studio, where his classmates included Steve McQueen. He rode motorcycles with James Dean and appeared with Cary Grant and James Mason in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

In the 1960’s, he and then-wife Barbara Bain starred in the hugely popular television series Mission Impossible.

He won an Oscar for a wonderfully witty portrayal of real-life horror movie star Bela Lugosi, making his final film with worst-director-ever Ed Wood, played by Johnny Depp.

May his memory be a blessing.

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But Did You Watch the Simpsons Version of Planet of the Apes?

Posted on July 18, 2017 at 8:00 am

To no one’s surprise, the critically acclaimed “War for the Planet of the Apes” was a big hit at the box office in its opening weekend. Vulture was inspired by this last of the rebooted trilogy to revisit one of its offshoots, the musical version in a “Simpsons” episode.

The bit has so many disparate parts — ’80s Austrian-pop parody, old-school-musical homage, Planet of the Apes, break-dancing, old vaudeville-style jokes — but in the hands of The Simpsons and its writers, it works. Or as Bill Oakley, one of the two showrunners at the time, told Vulture, “ was just a magic visit from the joke fairy.”

One of my favorite details: “The person running the room had never seen it, yet was able to concoct a beloved parody of it just through pop-culture osmosis.”

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Behind the Scenes Television

Susan Glatzer on her Swing Dance Documentary, “Alive and Kicking”

Posted on July 18, 2017 at 1:37 am

The director of the new swing dance documentary “Alive and Kicking” knows her subject from the inside out. Susan Glatzer is a swing dancer herself and “part of the dance world,” which she vividly depicts in the film as an exceptionally joyous, generous, and connected community. My interview with Ms. Glatzer is now on the website of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.

Here is an excerpt:

“Each dance is so special because it’s how each partner is interpreting the music and reacting to their partner. So as Andrea Gordon says in the film, it’s almost like you dance with someone you have never met before and by the end you feel like you can finish each other’s sentences because you’re connecting on a very, very basic human level of touch and movement and music and improvisation and trust. There is that incredible connection that goes well beyond ‘we have a shared passion.’

You’ll never have the same dance and you’re always looking for that next high with somebody else. You go on to the next person, the next partner but that’s when you get the sense of community. And you can go to a town where you do not know anyone and have an instant community of people who will welcome you….

It’s not about having a beautiful line; it’s being a badass, and it’s being silly and goofy. The whole point of this is: take the time, have fun, be silly, be goofy, be as crazy as you can be. The competitions are really intense and people do amazing stuff but at the end they all just want to dance with each other and cheer each other on. Everybody just wants to see something great and have fun and then we all have a good time and dance with each other.”

“Alive and Kicking” is now available on streaming and DVD.

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Directors Interview

David Lowery on “A Ghost Story” — The Costume, the Pie, the Story of Grief

Posted on July 17, 2017 at 12:35 pm

My interview with writer/director/editor David Lowery is on HuffPost. He explains the mechanics of the surprisingly complicated ghost costume worn by Casey Affleck through the film, and the already-legendary scene of Rooney Mara eating an entire pie.

It definitely started with Charlie Brown. We initially thought that were going to take a childlike image of a ghost, the Halloween costume that everyone knows from Charlie Brown and finds some pathos in it. But to find that pathos we really had to develop that symbol, that image that costume to a degree we hadn’t expected.

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Directors Interview Writers