Word: hitchcock
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mining town of Douglas, Ariz., he played football at Berkeley, then went East and upended movie criticism. Writing for the New Republic, the Nation, Time, Cavalier and a host of art and film journals, Farber elevated the reps of blue collar directors while snipering critics' darlings like Hitchcock and Welles. (Citizen Kane was "exciting but hammy.") He sold these advanced ideas through the startling sprung rhythm of his prose, packing an essay's worth of insights into a parenthetical aside, leaving the alert reader exhausted and grateful...
...movies that didn't make it to my neighborhood. The drive-ins had closed down and there wasn't the direct-to-video market yet, so there wasn't much of a home for movies like that. I also remember getting a lot of Hitchcock with my parents and discovering Robert Altman, which was huge for me. Watching McCabe and Mrs. Miller for the first time - when I thought I knew what a Western was - totally redefined the genre...
...attached to a new film, a few fond hopes. Think of Robert Donat, suave fugitive of The 39 Steps, double-talking his way out of a political rally and into the clutches of the man with the missing fingertip. Or Cary Grant doing anything in almost any Hitchcock caper: wooing Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, dodging a malefic crop duster in North by Northwest. Grant also adorned the genre's apogee, Stanley Donen's Charade, in which the star has five identities and a protective lust for Audrey Hepburn. Neat plotting, chic dialogue, a funny-grotesque supporting cast...
...Remember, these are the people whose critical enthusiasm raised Alfred Hitchcock from genre master to world master. Indeed, you could argue that Tell No One is a variant on one of Hitchcock's favorite themes: the running man whose story no one (except us in the audience) believes. These fictions, of course, depend for their success on the French respect for rationalism (and their horror when reason is torn asunder by criminal irrationality). They are also greatly enhanced by the firm, but casually stated, French respect for life's realities. A drama like Tell No One takes place against...
...this year, the red-winged blackbird hysteria seems louder than ever. Joggers along Lake Michigan have gotten plucked. Workers on the edge of the city's downtown business district have lunched on street corners instead of park benches to avoid becoming part of a reenactment of Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 classic The Birds. Experts say it appears urban red wings are more aggressive than their rural counterparts, partly because the city birds are particularly sensitive to (or fed up with) excessive human encroachment on their turf...