Word: hollywooders
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...admirers called it "the Lubitsch touch"--a deft, vigorous approach to comedy that graced Hollywood romances like Trouble in Paradise, Ninotchka and Heaven Can Wait. But before Ernst Lubitsch arrived in the U.S., he had helped establish the infant German cinema as a beacon of sophisticated drama and innovative technique. Kino, the top DVD label for silent films, offers a four-disc sampler of the director's early work, all from 1919 to 1921, including lavish historical dramas (Anna Boleyn), mountain films (The Wildcat, with a very feral Pola Negri) and delightful comedies. Best is The Oyster Princess, "a grotesque...
...Hollywood once believed in the division of labor: writers wrote, and directors directed. Sturges, who did both with ease, changed all that in a whirlwind few years (1940-44) at Paramount, where he auteured an incredible eight films--amazing in their quantity and quality. Seven of those comedies (all but The Miracle of Morgan's Creek) are amassed here as a reminder of how fast, reckless and smart movies can be. Sturges' social satire fizzes in The Great McGinty and Hail the Conquering Hero. But the pearl is The Lady Eve, with con artiste Barbara Stanwyck seducing naive Henry Fonda...
FORBIDDEN HOLLYWOOD COLLECTION...
...Mostly, the play provides an excuse for overcooked gag lines about how Hollywood agents can't be trusted, how artists are corrupted by the philistines who make movies, how people in California order Cobb salads with everything on the side. Some of the lines trade on offhand buzzwords: "tears finding their lazy way down his derm-abrased face." Other just slap us hard in the kisser: "A writer with final cut - I'd rather give firearms to small children." Compared to a really incisive Hollywood satire like HBO's Entourage, this is pretty lame stuff...
...classic Hollywood car chase scene, all that really matters is whether the cops get their man in the end, collateral damage and legal niceties be damned. Think Steve McQueen as Bullitt pursuing a black Dodge Charger through San Francisco and then, just outside the city, pulling along side to smack the car into a gas station for a pyrotechnic finish. Or Gene Hackman, as detective Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, careering through Brooklyn streets while chasing a villain in an elevated train, smashing cars along...