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Mar

Goddess and Genius

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller were the 20th century’s real-life odd couple. Hollywood married Manhattan when they hooked up, big breasts coupled with big brains, the effervescent sex kitten went arm in arm with the scowling intellectual. Rath

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Mar

The Pleasure of Being Robbed

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

We meet Eleonore in The Pleasure of Being Robbed as she greets a total stranger on the street as if she’s a long-lost friend, all the while relieving her of her purse. An incorrigible thief for reasons never explained, Eleonore (Eleonore Hendricks) st

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Mar

Cold Souls

Paul Giamatti Loses Himself

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

David Straithairn doesn’t look like the devil, but the suave physician he plays in Cold Souls (out now on DVD) trades in human souls for money. Oh, of course, he does so in the name of happiness. He even evokes the old buzzword of progress. But his gl

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Mar

Clash of the Gods

Myths on the History Channel

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

The gods of ancient Greece haven’t been widely worshipped since the fourth century, but linger on as important archetypes in literature and human psychology. The History Channel series “Clash of the Gods” looks at prominent figures in the Greek panthe

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Mar

Bollywood Remembers

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

Music is integral to most Bollywood movies, those colorful, often modestly budgeted pictures from India’s prolific film industry. Characters unselfconsciously break into song and even the gods themselves descend to join the dance. Among the most proli

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Mar

Baader Meinhof Complex

Revolution in �60s Germany

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

For millions who came of age in the 1960s, peace, love and understanding was a bourgeois farce. And while the media of the ’00s fixated on Sgt. Pepper and Woodstock, for many the defining events of the late ’60s were the bloody upheavals that erupted ar

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Mar

The Last King of Scotland

Forest Whitaker’s Oscar Victory

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

“Inspired by real people and events,” The Last King of Scotland (2005) should not be confused with an accurate chronicle of Idi Amin’s reign in Uganda. But the political thriller (out now on Blu-ray) about a naïve young Scott, a recent medical school

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Mar

My Name is Khan

Bollywood Comes to America

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

My Name is Khan is an unusual Bollywood movie and the soundtrack follows suit. The story concerns a young Indian Muslim with Asperger’s syndrome, living in San Francisco at the start of the last decade with his beautiful Indian wife. Khan’s life is shatte

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Mar

Joaquin Phoenix Walks the Line

The Legend of the Man in Black

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

Johnny Cash walked into the rockabilly scene sideways, almost by accident, yet has become the early rock’n’roll figure most admired by generations unconceived during the 1950s and ‘60s. Joaquin Phoenix stepped into a set of myth-size shoes when he t

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Mar

2000 Years of Christianity in 6 Hours

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

The rise of a small, persecuted sect into a dominant force of world history, if not the single most important movement in human thought and feeling, is a large topic even for a six-hour documentary. The A&E Channel’s “Christianity: The First Two T

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Mar

The T.A.M.I. Show

Classic Rock Movie

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

A few years later, the Rolling Stones would be called the world‚s greatest rock’n’roll band. But on the day in 1964 when a concert movie called The T.A.M.I. Show was shot, the Stones were upstaged by the act that preceded them. James Brown’s fervent Pen

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Mar

Paris City of a Million Stories

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

Pierre is downcast from the news. The professional dancer has just been told that he has a serious heart problem, which can only be addressed with a transplant; even then, the odds of success are equal to a coin toss. Afterward, Pierre (Romain Duris)

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Mar

The Kennedy Assassination

3 Shots That Changed the World

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

The assassination of John F. Kennedy caused a rupture in the psyche of many Americans. The History Channel documentary “JFK: 3 Shots That Changed America” (out on DVD) allows pictures from the event to speak for themselves with the aid of editorial choi

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Feb

Hollywood Musicals

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

In the colorfully packaged book Hollywood Musicals (published by QNY), Will Dodson celebrates that happiest of genres and the stars that emerged from it—Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Bing Crosby and Gene Kelly. Musical theater in one form or another

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Feb

The Lady Killers

Classic British Comedy

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

If the Coen Brothers’ 2004 remake of The Lady Killers served any purpose, it was to alert audiences unfamiliar with the 1955 original. The earlier Lady Killers was produced by Ealing Studios, which excelled during the ‘50s with droll English comedy. I

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Feb

The End of the Line

A Future without Fish

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

For thousands of years, men went down to the sea in fishing boats. In the past 50 years, the boats became bigger and bigger as corporations, which increasingly dominated commercial ocean fishing, implemented industrial strategies. Nowadays trawlers sc

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Feb

Alice in Wonderland

Danny Elfman’s Music

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

Tim Burton and Danny Elfman are almost as inseparable in the imagination as Batman and Robin. Most of Burton’s films have featured original scores by Elfman, whose music is integral to the mood of the pictures. Elfman will be audible throughout

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Feb

Cult Films

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

Don’t get him started on movies like Attack of the Killer Bimbos (1988). Will Dodson sets strict standards in his book, Cult Films (published by QNY). For him, a cult movie isn’t simply a theatrical failure that eventually found an audience, nor a Kille

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Feb

Contempt of Hollywood

Jean-Luc Godard's Satire

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

The worldwide acclaim of Breathless (1960) transformed film critic Jean-Luc Godard into the leading director of the French new wave and infante terrible of European art house cinema. Fascinated yet repelled by Hollywood, Godard approached the structure

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Feb

The Kennedy Assassination

24 Hours After

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

The famous photograph of Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in as President aboard Air Force One with an ashen Jackie Kennedy at his side presented a reassuring image of continuity as it was sent across the wires. John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated

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Feb

The People Speak

A Howard Zinn Film

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

Asked again and again by students for a book that was critical of American history, rather than repeating the same old platitudes, Howard Zinn despaired and wrote his own. A People’s History of the United States (1980) became one of the best selling boo

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Feb

No Sweat

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

Beneath the glamor of the fashion industry is a factory system built largely on the backs of ill-paid, often mistreated workers in “developing countries” and in Los Angeles, nowadays the hub of America’s garment industry for companies tha

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Feb

The Universe Season Four

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

The cosmos seems to expand in all directions as the human eye and imagination see further into the mystery with no end in sight. One of History Channel’s most interesting series, “The Universe,” explores space, matter and time—“the place we call the uni

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Feb

World War in HD

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

When we think about World War II, we usually imagine it in black and white, as it was recorded in most of the photographs and newsreels we have seen. In recent years, however, troves of archival footage shot in color have made their way onto DVDs and

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Feb

Secret Policeman’s Private Party

Laughing with the Python Crew

David Luhrssen I Hate Hollywood

Mention The Secret Policeman’s Ball and music usually comes to mind—performances by an array of top performers from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s in a series of fundraisers for Amnesty International. But comedy was always at the heart of the project. The S

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