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Friday, November 29, 2024 — Houston, TX

Joseph Allencherril

NEWS 2/1/12 6:00pm

Classic Flicks: Chaplin shines in 'City Lights'

By Joseph Allencherril

Charlie Chaplin is renowned for his silent films produced in America, but he was actually a British export; he migrated to the United States in his early 20s. His line of influence runs from Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot through Rowan Atkinson's Mr. Bean. Now is good a time to emphasis his contemporary relevance, as The Artist, has recently become the first black-and-white silent film in decades to be nominated for multiple Academy Awards.

NEWS 1/17/12 6:00pm

Classic Flicks: Raging Bull scores Scorsese a timeless knockout

By Joseph Allencherril

It has taken so long for me to write a review on Martin Scorsese because I assumed the whole world knew and loved his films and the thickly bespectacled, furry-browed, Italian New Yorker didn't need any more attention. However, the other day, I made a reference to Raging Bull in conversation. "Raging what?" my fellow conversant asked. I then realized there is a problem with the state of Scorsese awareness.

NEWS 11/30/11 6:00pm

Classic Flicks: 12 days of movies

By Joseph Allencherril

In case you find yourself at home this winter sipping hot cocoa with nothing better to do than expand your cinematic consciousness, here is a list of some fantastic films, both new and old, which will hopefully while away the winter blues. You will notice that the majority of these films are neither actually holiday-themed nor in any particular order, but great films need no season.

NEWS 11/16/11 6:00pm

Classic Flicks: Some, including me, like it hot

By Joseph Allencherril

Once upon a very sad time, I erroneously thought that I had seen every funny movie in existence. By the age of 12, I had zoomed through the comedic classics of the 1980s and subsequently sailed through the gems of the 1990s. But one day, my parents forced me to sit through Some Like it Hot, a comedy my grandfather would likely have enjoyed in his prime.

NEWS 11/1/11 7:00pm

Classic Flicks: Crimes and Misdemeanors darkens comedy

By Joseph Allencherril

Born Allen Stewart Konigsberg, Woody Allen is one of a handful of Renaissance men in the film industry. Even in his seventh decade, he has kept up the pace of releasing about one film a year, if not more; he released Midnight in Paris to widespread critical acclaim this past summer, and is currently working on the film Nero Fiddled, which is set for release in 2012. Apparently, I am not alone in my admiration: film-making legend Francis Ford Coppola himself once wished that to be able write as freely as Woody Allen did so that he would not have to always work from another writer's screenplay.

NEWS 10/19/11 7:00pm

Classic Flicks: Bergman

By Joseph Allencherril

Few directors can claim to be more influential than Ingmar Bergman. Martin Scorsese said, "I guess I'd put it like this: If you were alive in the '50s and the '60s and of a certain age, a teenager on your way to becoming an adult, and you wanted to make films, I don't see how you couldn't be influenced by Bergman." Woody Allen, an unlikely disciple, said that Bergman was "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera."

NEWS 10/5/11 7:00pm

Classic Flicks: Akira Kurosawa's Red Beard

By Joseph Allencherril

Most film buffs will at least pause at the altar of Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. So much has been elegantly said and written about Kurosawa that it feels almost redundant to write an appreciation of his films, but his influence seems to be more indirectly felt by modern audiences. Kurosawa's works have inspired popular filmmakers, from western film guru0 John Ford to the king of pulp, Quentin Tarantino.

NEWS 9/21/11 7:00pm

Classic Flicks: Duck Soup

By Joseph Allencherril

In a list of the greatest artistic works of the 20th century, Harold Bloom, arguably one of the America's most prominent and influential literary and cultural critics, named Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, a selection of poetic works of Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and the Marx Brothers comedy Duck Soup. This last cinematic inclusion in Bloom's 20th-century American sublime may come as a surprise: All the other choices were serious works of high art, but Duck Soup was a frivolous 1930s comedy! How could that possibly be included, while Citizen Kane was out?

NEWS 9/7/11 7:00pm

Relish: Satyajit Ray's Indian cinema

By Joseph Allencherril

Before writing off all Indian cinema as sub-par because of the rather dime-a-dozen, homogeneous output of contemporary Bollywood cinema, you ought to see the films of Satyajit Ray.  Believe it or not, breaking out in song and dance has not always been the norm in Indian cinema; before that, there was Ray, the first true master of ?Indian film.

NEWS 8/24/11 7:00pm

Classic Flicks: Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

By Joseph Allencherril

The first film to win all five of the major Academy Awards (Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Screenplay and Best Picture) was Frank Capra's still-fresh screwball comedy It Happened One Night in 1934. It would be more than four decades before Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest pulled off this same fantastic feat in 1975. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest is the film that converted me from a 2000s-film lover to pre-1980s-film seeker. Prior to seeing the film, I had an unfair prejudice toward films not made during my lifetime; if a movie had not been made in the '90s or '00s, I thought it impossible for it to make me laugh or to even keep my attention for more than eight minutes.

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