The Tragicomic Tightrope Walk of Melvin Monster (or Even More Comics by John Stanley)
Last year, we saw some of the funnybook masterpieces John Stanley created in 1962 —…
Year of the Month: The Even More Total Inexplicability of FUN IN BALLOON LAND
Fun in Balloon Land is a strange and perplexing object. (Notice I didn’t say “movie?”…
CITIZEN KANE: T for Technique and T for Tragedy
Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made, but it’s not the greatest movie Orson…
Year of the Month: BLOOD AND SAND
The standard line on Old Hollywood filmmaking is that it was born out of the…
Year of the Month: The Incredible Craft of Disney Shorts
When I was just a little guy in Burgundy Jammies, I watched all the Disney…
Year of the Month: The Gonzo Garbage of Golan and Globus, Part 2
If I told you Bolero was a movie with a bullfighter who gets gored in…
Year of the Month: The Gonzo Garbage of Golan and Globus, Part 1
In 1984, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus produced John Cassavettes’ classic Love Streams for the…
YOJIMBO: A Man with No Name
A man walks down the only street in a small town. The wind blows dust…
Year of the Month: LOONEY TUNES
It’s almost as cliché to point out that history doesn’t divide itself neatly by decade…
When THE SIMPSONS Was Sincere: Bart Gets an “F”
The Simpsons is known for embodying, maybe even inventing, a certain kind of arch nineties…