It’s hard to decide if J. Lee Thompson’s final years making movies for Cannon could be branded a reprieve from retirement for the veteran writer / editor / director, or the nadir of a skilled filmmaker who peaked with two magnificent back-to-back classics: the WWII epic The Guns of Navarone and the brutal revenge thriller Cape Fear…
Reviews of two zingers from Woody Allen: the not-really-comedic Stardust Memories (1980) and the brilliant mockumentary Zelig (1983), both on Blu from Twilight Time.
Woody Allen’s examination of fame, adulation, and the worth of a comedian’s career is filtered through a Felliniesque lens that’s still a bit of a challenge 35+ years since its release, perhaps because, to paraphrase fan salvos aimed at central character Sandy Bates, ‘it’s not as funny as his older films…
Woody Allen’s Zelig drew plenty of attention for its bravura visual effects in which fictional Leonard Zelig (Allen, of course) and others were seamlessly blended with real newsreel and archival film footage, creative a perfect mockumentary that feels like some previously lost, one-time, feature-length Fox Movietone production that was initially aborted and later completed decades after the footage was discovered in some dank vault holding RKO oddities…
Review + podcast interview with Out of Print director Julia Marchese, and reviews of Peter Flynn’s The Dying of the Light (2015) + Angela Christlieb and Stephan Kijak’s Cinemania (2002) …and last but not least, in the Editor’s Blog, a detailed account of a 16mm short’s post-production, circa 1990.
Connect