Adrian, God of Glamour

by Cláudio Alves

Born Adrian Adolph Greenberg, the designer best known as Adrian was one of the most influential costumers in Hollywood history. After working in his family business of millinery, Adrian went on to study costume design in New York and Paris and later found work dressing the starlets of Broadway. His talents soon took him to Hollywood, where he found a home from the mid-1920s to the 1940s, designing the costumes for many an MGM classic. Throughout his tenure in Tinsel Town, Adrian perfected the on and offscreen looks of such great divas as Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, Vivien Leigh, Ingrid Bergman, Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr, and others. Among them, his most essential collaborator and muse was the one and only Joan Crawford…

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Ryan Murphy's "Hollywood" Finale

by Cláudio Alves

Sometimes artists dig their own graves by badly promoting or describing their works. Ryan Murphy's Hollywood is, to me, a good example of that. First off, the title is too vague, promising a portrait of Hollywood history instead of the fantasy the series presents. "Dreamland" would be an infinitely better name, both as a descriptor of the content and a tie-in to the narrative's details.

Titles aside, another big problem surrounding Hollywood is how many have been calling it revisionist history. It's no such thing…

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In defense of Faye Dunaway in "Mommie Dearest"

It's Mother's Day in Portugal and Mother's Day next Sunday in the US. Since we're celebrating 1981 this week, we're starting early with the biggest, meanest mother of them all!

by Cláudio Alves

In 1971, in her book titled My Way of Life, Joan Crawford, the legendary diva of Old Hollywood, said that, of all the actresses of the time, only Faye Dunaway had the talent, the class and the courage to be a movie star. Had she lived to see the younger actress play her in the infamous Mommie Dearest, Crawford would have probably revised her statement. The 1981 biopic is one of the great camp classics of all time, a prestige picture with pretensions of Oscar glory that crashed and burned most spectacularly. Dunaway herself is said to have believed she was on her way to Academy Award glory. Instead, she got a Razzie for Worst Actress...

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Jean Arthur on Criterion

by Cláudio Alves

Charming and witty, Jean Arthur was one of the great actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. While nowadays she's most famous for her comedic works, Arthur wasn't constricted to only humorous movies, being able to play everything from melodramas to crime pictures. Still, it's easy to see why her comedy talents are her calling card to this day. The actress was able to bring the manic, unstable energy of screwball comedy to all of her movies, imbuing them with an electrifying unpredictability. Like a black hole can bend light, so did Arthur bend the tone of every film she was in, making projects bow to the power of her screen presence and helping them become better, more complicated cinema in the process.

Her filmography is full of greatness. The Criterion Channel is celebrating her enviable resume with a new collection of 16 of her films available to stream. Here are some major highlights from that sterling selection…

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In defense of "The Artist"

by Cláudio Alves

For Oscar obsessives, it's no news that to win big at the Academy Awards can be a curse rather than a blessing. The reigning champions are more discussed and overtly scrutinized than the defeated, their triumph like sweet nectar, attracting the bees of discontentment, resentment, and retroactive bashing. The tides of time can also make an atypical choice seem like a perfunctory one. Notice how some of our strangest Oscar champions of recent vintage have gained the fame of being boring winners when they're anything but. You might not like The Shape of Water, for instance, but a love story between a mute woman and a fish-man is not your run of the mill Best Picture winner.

The same can be said about The Artist, a romantic tale with comedic overtones that, in 2012, became the first silent film to win the Oscars' top honor since 1928…

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