It feels like the biggest jump cut ever.
On December 1, 2009, I dropped a thin line into the ocean of social media, hoping to connect with a film nerd or two. That was the birth of Alfred Hitchcock Geek on Facebook. Smash cut to today and, somehow, a community of over 195,000 fans has gathered from around the world to celebrate our geekery for the Master of Cinema! Along the way, to keep up with the conversation, we added a couple of very special co-hosts: Elisabeth Karlin and Pat McFadden, who bring a wealth of knowledge and three healthy scoops of passion, perspective and wit.
In this…
Here’s a stand you can take while sitting down.
With the coronavirus pandemic creating chaos in the toilet paper aisle, now’s a great time to get our rear ends back to school for some potty (re)training. Why? Because of this number:
27,000.
That’s how many trees are sacrificed to mankind’s bungholes — every day. And America’s the biggest consumer by far. Our TP consumption is literally wiping out the world’s forests. That was a poo pun. There will be more. Many more.
If you live in America, you might think that a wad of Angel Soft is the best, the cleanest, the only right way to battle the cling-ons…
Here’s a stand you can take while sitting down.
With the coronavirus pandemic creating chaos in the toilet paper aisle, now’s a great time to get our rear ends back to school for some potty (re)training. Why? Because of this number:
27,000.
That’s how many trees are sacrificed to mankind’s bungholes — every day. And America’s the biggest consumer by far. Our TP consumption is literally wiping out the world’s forests. That was a poo pun. There will be more. Many more.
If you live in America, you might think that a wad of Angel Soft is the best, the cleanest, the only right way to battle the cling-ons…
Although I’ve moved my personal library more times than I want to count, one organizational quirk persists: I always keep the African-American authors together in one section, segregated in a separate-but-equal space — currently left of T. C. Boyle (appropriately enough) and directly above Hemingway (justly so). A more equitable arrangement would sprinkle them among the rest of my fiction, non-fiction and poetry, in more-or-less alphabetical order. But — Melvil Dewey be damned — there is a method at work — as a matter of access, this system works better. …
Scratch beneath the nitrate gloss of any given Alfred Hitchcock movie, and you’ll find it’s flabbergastingly erudite.
If you’re going to properly geek out on Hitchcock’s films, plan on picking up a little nineteenth century German philosophy, twentieth century geopolitics, art history, the cultural impact of Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System and lot more along the way. It’s a bachelors degree in the humanities, taught by a single, rather droll professor. I bring this up because, in my last Hitchcock Geek video — Freak the Geek: Dead Ringers, Part 3 — I needed to create an infographic (shown above) that could succinctly describe Male Gaze theory as it relates to Hitchcock. In the spirit of his style, I…
As mentioned in Part One of this Freak the Geek miniseries, I think there’s a scene that director Justin Lin lifted directly from Hitchcock while making The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. (No harm nor foul, it’s just artistic license.) It comes from To Catch a Thief.
But to get there and see the connection, let’s back up a bit. Often dismissed as Hitchcock’s greatest puff piece, To Catch a Thief is all about the chase. Everyone in this movie is either pursuing someone, or they’re being pursued: Grace Kelly chases flirtatiously after Cary Grant, who’s chasing down…
What could any movie that’s all about hot cars, teen angst and burning rubber have to do with the Master of the Macabre? Actually, quite a lot.
Justin Lin’s Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift is a coming of age story. When hot-rodding neo-greaser teen Sean Boswell (Lucas Black), puts himself on the wrong side of both the law and the snooty socs in his high school, he gets shipped off to live with his absentee father in Japan.
Soon enough…
“A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
That’s what Jorge Luis Borges (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986) — born 11 days after Alfred Hitchcock — had to say about a creative person’s imperative to move close to their…
In 1975, Alfred Hitchcock was the third-biggest investor in Universal Studios, making him a wealthy man — and a towering presence among its creative leadership. Meanwhile, there was a much younger pup of a director who seemed to be all over the studio property at the same time. That was 26-year-old Stephen Spielberg. He’d just released the smash hit Jaws — and he badly wanted to meet his idol, Hitchcock.
The Old Lion seemed to respect the Young Turk. And considering that Hitch’s office bungalow was right there on the lot next door to Edith Head’s, they should have met…
“Alfred Hitchcock very much lived an artist’s life, and the boundaries between his daily life and art were very much blurred. He ate, drank and slept filmmaking. That’s why he amassed this art collection, and I think it was part of a larger strategy to become his films; so that in the writing and producing of them, they would come from a deep, personal space.” That’s what I said to Ferren Gipson recently in an interview for her Art Matters podcast. We discussed Hitchcock’s deep connection to modern art, and how influences from his favorite creators — guys like Paul…
