I just heard that Abel Gance’s monumental La Roue is to be released on DVD May 8th. La Roue was Gance’s major project before his five-and-a-half hour Napoleon. It’s an epic Zola-esque love triangle set against the iron and steam imagery of the French railways. I’ve been wanting to see it ever since I read…

There’s a story of a Disney staff party which included a screening of an in-house short in which featured Mickey and Minnie getting raunchy. Walt Disney stood up afterwards, expressed appreciation, praised the quality of the work, and asked who was responsible for it. The two animators put their hands up and he fired them…

A theatre not too far from where I live – it would be mean of me to name it – sends out a quarterly newsletter which includes a regular ad for pre-show dining at a nearby restaurant. The ad always includes this proud image: Now, I know there’s an art to photographing food in a…

In a Blog post responding to Lost, In Transition, Carlo C draws attention to something that I hadn’t been aware of before; that in the Lost soundtrack, in addition to the forest whispers sometimes heard by the characters, there’s also ‘hidden audio’ that carries a certain amount of story freight. Or maybe the illusion of…

One of my closest friends lives in New Orleans. We’ve managed to get together no more than half a dozen times in the thirty years since we met, but that’s how some friendships can be. First we kept in touch with long letters, the occasional phone call, and the the annual exchange of bizarre Christmas…

And Season’s Greetings to all.