Happy Birthday, Shelley Duvall!

by Cláudio Alves

Shelley Duvall is one of a kind. Upon seeing her work in Altman's 3 Women, Andrew Sarris compared her to "a young Katharine Hepburn," while Pauline Kael said she was the "closest thing we've ever come to a female Buster Keaton." And yet, the critic would also inevitably arrive at the same conclusion that she was unique. "There are no forebears or influences that would help to explain Shelley Duvall's acting; she doesn't seem to owe anything to anyone." And so, it's a tragedy that, nowadays, she's mostly remembered as the woman broken by Stanley Kubrick during The Shining's grueling shoot, a pop psychology misreading that's spread through social media despite Duvall's own words on the matter.

Infuriating, it's condescending to a great multi-hyphenated artist whose independence and ambition defined a decades-spanning career in entertainment. Let's keep the wonders of Duvall's work alive and bright, let's remember and honor. I invite you to celebrate the iconoclast on this special occasion, the actress' 74th birthday in a year marked by her return to cinema in The Forest Hills…

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: Tribeca Film Festival x4

By Glenn Dunks

The Tribeca Film Festival is sadly a no-go for 2020, but the teams behind some of the festival’s documentary selections have made their films available for press so we’re going to take a look at a few and hope that one day they make their way to screens for you in the future.

Let us start with a delight of a drag kiki in P.S. Burn This Letter Please, tracing an underground circuit of drag queens, female impersonators and gender illusionists in 1950s pre-Stonewall New York City. Prompted by the discovery of a box of letters all addressed to a mysterious man named Reno -- I won’t spoil the fun, but the recipient has ties to Michelle Pfeiffer! -- who kept them secret, and in doing so has kept alive a part of queer history that is too fabulous to stay hidden away. Through these letters and interviews with some of the surviving queens, directors Jennifer Tiexiera (an excellent editor of works such as Dragonslayer, one of my top documentaries of the decade, and 17 Blocks) and Michael Seligman (a producer on RuPaul’s Drag Race) untangle the insignificant dramas and life-changing moments of Daphne, Adrian, Claudia, Rita George and the rest of the gang.

Before Paris is Burning and even before The Queen, P.S. Burn This Letter Please offers insight where there has historically been so little. As one talking head explains, this is real gay history in black and white.

Click to read more ...

Horror Actressing: Shelley Duvall in "The Shining"

by Jason Adams

Why isn't the face of "Cabin Fever" that of Shelley Duvall's? Why isn't it her Wendy Torrance huddled behind that bathroom door holding a knife that we see, instead of Jack Nicholson's Jack peering through the broken slats? I mean we all know the answer -- it rhymes with "Fuctural Fisogyny" -- but maybe we should start to do something about that. All of the news stories we've seen over the past few weeks about the victims of domestic abuse being quarantined at home with their abusers feels like a good start to having that conversation. Losing your mind trapped in a single location is scary, but being trapped in one place with a person you love who has lost theirs is scary tenfold.

For all of the abuse that Shelley Duvall suffered as an actress at the hands of her director Stanley Kubrick in the making of The Shining it feels just, and way overdue, to re-situate the film as that of Wendy Torrance's story of survival...

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: In the Shadow of Kubrick with 'Filmworker'

by Glenn Dunks

Sometimes you really can tell a book by its cover. Or in this case, a movie by its poster. The artwork for Tony Zierra’s Filmworker shows a photograph of Stanley Kubrick on set with his long-time yet little-known collaborator Leon Vitali hovering behind him. Kubrick, normally the focus of these sort of non-fiction works, is unusually blurred. Our eye naturally focuses on Vitali despite Kubrick’s appearance that can’t be entirely obscured no matter how hard they try.

It’s fitting for Filmworker, a documentary about Vitaly not Kubrick. Although, as was probably always inevitable about a film about the people around one of cinema’s most commanding and famous names, Kubrick remains a constant presence who is too hard to ignore...

Click to read more ...

Beauty vs Beast: To Boston With Love

Jason from MNPP here with this week's "Beauty vs Beast" - the director David Gordon Green is turning 43 today, so while we wait to see what he does with his Halloween sequel-o-sorts later this year let's cast an eye  a millimeter backwards towards his last movie, the very fine but somewhat overlooked Stronger. I personally was pretty sad the movie never gained any footing during the awards season for its stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Tatiana Maslany or for Miranda Richardson in Supporting - they were all worthy in my book (and Jake made the Bronze in Nathaniel's Film Bitch Awards). But time will be kind to all of them, I think. The film isn't easy on any of its characters - it refuses to sanctify the terror victim or the "supporting girlfriend" at its heart at every turn. These are complicated people in an extremely complicated situation.

panel management

PREVIOUSLY Toss a bone up and see where it lands - last week we wished Stanely Kubrick's 2001 a happy 50 and y'all surprised me with your love for humanity of all things (this is Kubrick, people!), giving Keir Dullea's space-babe a 4% victory over the dead red eye of HAL-9000. Said MARIAH, perhaps summing many of our votes up (Keir was a piece, it's true):

"I am voting for Dave because I am a homosexual male."