Earlier this week Nobel Laureate in Literature Bob Dylan fulfilled his obligation to the Norwegian Institute with a remarkable speech that looked back over a few of the formative influences of his work (and they might surprise you). This inspired us to take a moment to consider some things Dylan, in part to provide a…
Is Olivier Assayas our greatest living director? If we believed in such pronouncements here at Mid Century Cinema, we could see the argument in favor. But we don’t. More to the point, as we found ourselves screening his films repeatedly (and, like Kubrick films, they invariably get better with each viewing), and musing about this…
May 17, 1967 marked the release of Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back (that’s right, no apostrophe). A documentary of Dylan’s 1965 visit to England, cameras followed as the twenty-four year old Bob performed in proper concerts and on informal occasions, held forth in sparring matches with a clueless, often hostile establishment press, bantered with his…
This week’s movie was Chinatown, and you might think that having written about this one previously – actually more than once – that we would be out of things to say about it. But you’d be wrong. On this occasion we’ll address the movie’s controversial ending (a conclusion writer Robert Towne objected to so strongly…
On April 22, 2017 Jack Nicholson turned eighty, and although he has been a big-time, world famous, larger-than-life movie star for over a third of a century, he holds a revered place at Mid Century Cinema for an earlier phase of his career. After ten years of struggle, at the end of which he was…
This week’s film was Sidney Lumet’s Network, a great movie that is so good and about so many things that one could talk about endlessly. But we have already talked about it a good bit, in a post from last year, and in a cranky review of a recent book about the movie. So with this…
“City on the Edge of Forever,” the twenty-eighth episode of the first season of Star Trek, aired on April 6 1967. Widely acclaimed, it is a fan favorite, and has been singled out for high praise by both Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner. A time-travel affair where the bulk of the action takes place in…
This week’s movie was Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, a relatively little-known obscurity that should be included in any serious discussion of the great films of the 1970s. That this is generally not the case can be attributed to a number of factors. It was an enormously troubled production—May shot a lot of film (legend…
This week’s movie was Francis Ford Coppola’s New Hollywood landmark The Conversation, one of the three films produced under the auspices of The Director’s Company, a partnership formed by hot-off-celebrated-hits Coppola (The Godfather), William Friedkin (The French Connection), and Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show). The arrangement with Paramount Pictures – modest budgets in exchange…
This week’s movie was actually Klute, but once again, having posted on that great film already, we decided to take the opportunity to talk about the next entry in Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoid trilogy”—The Parallax View. (All the President’s Men would round out the set.) One of the great paranoid thrillers of the seventies (possibly…