News

'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl': Johnny Depp as Capt. Jack Sparrow. 'Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl' review: Mostly an enjoyable romp (Oscar Movie Series) Pirate movies were a Hollywood staple for about three decades, from the mid-'20s (The Sea Hawk, The Black Pirate) to the mid-to-late '50s (Moonfleet, The Buccaneer), when the genre, by then mostly relegated to B films, began to die down. Sporadic resurrections in the '80s and '90s turned out to be critical and commercial bombs (Pirates, Cutthroat Island), something that didn't bode well for the Walt Disney Company's $140 million-budgeted film "adaptation" of one of their theme-park rides. But Neptune's mood has apparently improved with the arrival of the new century. He smiled – grinned would be a more appropriate word – on the Gore Verbinski-directed Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,...

Quentin Tarantino introduces his personal 16mm print of "Frenchman's Creek," part of the excellent Arturo de Cordova retrospective in Morelia this year, with a fast-talking infectious rush of enthusiasm. He says that he discovered the film on late night television when he was 16 or 17, and that he was in an acting class with a woman who said she liked Arturo de Cordova, and when he saw "Frenchman's Creek," he completely agreed with her -- and he watched it whenever he could again, over 20 or 30 years.  At the time, he didn't know that de Cordova was one of the great stars of Mexican cinema. He's only seen a couple of his Spanish-language films, he said, "and that's why it's so great to be at this festival. Boy is de Cordoba cool in this movie!" And he repeats "super cool" after he hears festival director Daniela Michel translate "cool" into Spanish that way.

Quentin Tarantino is in Morelia, Mexico for the third time. Why? He's coming for the same reasons he did it back in 2010: be the curator of a film program. Tarantino landed in Morelia on Monday but it was until yesterday that things went crazy, when the director of Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained made his appearance at the principal movie theater (Cinépolis Morelia Centro) to watch the Mexican film La Zandunga (Fernando de Fuentes, 1938). It's worth noting that La Zandunga is part of the festival's program to homage actor Arturo de Córdova, for which Qt contributed with two 35mm prints from his personal collection: Frenchman's Creek and Adventures of Casanova. Ever since Morelia 2013 confirmed the surprise visit of Tarantino, many questions have...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

Joan Blondell. Those who have heard the name will most likely picture either a blowsy, older woman playing the worldwise but warm-hearted saloon owner in the late 1960s television series Here Come the Brides, or a lively, fast-talking, no-nonsense, and unconventionally sexy gold digger in numerous Pre-Code Warner Bros. comedies and musicals of the early 1930s. Matthew Kennedy's Joan Blondell: A Life Between Takes (University Press of Mississippi, 2007) seeks to rectify that cultural memory lapse. Not that Blondell doesn't deserve to be remembered for Here Come the Brides or, say, Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade, Havana Widows, and Broadway Bad. It's just that her other work — from her immensely touching performance as a sexually liberated woman in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to her invariably welcome (if brief) appearances in films as varied as The Blue Veil, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and Grease — should be remembered as well.