Bernardo Bertolucci on being burned by Hollywood

Bernardo Bertolucci on being burned by Hollywood

Outside Bernardo Bertolucci’s apartment in Rome there is a large goods lift. Once it carried supplies and shopping from floor to floor but now the goods it carries are Bertolucci and one of his three wheelchairs. Ten years ago, Bertolucci had what he was told would be routine back surgery on a herniated disc. After […]

Where The Walls Still Talk

Where The Walls Still Talk

Tales from the legendary hotel-slash-commune that housed Jackson Pollock, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan, Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, and Sid Vicious—told by residents like Rufus Wainwright, Betsey Johnson, R. Crumb, and Andy Warhol. Wll vanish before the city’s merchant greed, Wreckers will wreck it, and in its stead More lofty walls will swell This old […]

Al Pacino: “You can’t let your skin get too thick”

Al Pacino: “You can’t let your skin get too thick”

Mr. Pacino, how do you deal with weight of your own achievements? I don’t know. You don’t think of it that way. You don’t think of those parts as achievements. You think of the roles you play, the paintings you’ve made. I mean, imagine an actor saying, “I don’t want to go on anymore because […]

The Hysterical Cinema of Emir Kusturica

The Hysterical Cinema of Emir Kusturica

There are two main images that instantly rise to mind when the words “Serbia” and “Cinema” appear together: the controversial “A Serbian Film” by Srdjan Spasojevic and the face of one of the most talented directors that Europe saw born in last decades, Emir Kusturica. For now, let’s just forget the blood and necrophilia of […]

“The River” – Springsteen’s Most Anxious Album

“The River” – Springsteen’s Most Anxious Album

The world is not lacking monuments to Bruce Springsteen. His work has been exhaustively parsed, reissued, celebrated, annotated, and admired. At present, it is wildly difficult to find a reasonable person willing to decry his oeuvre as insignificant or inadequate. In the nineteen-sixties, after Woody Guthrie got sick, Bob Dylan seemed primed to become the […]