~openculture | Bookmarks (5)

Studio Ghibli fans are still pondering the meaning of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, which came out last year. Though by some measure the studio’s most lavish feature yet — not least by the measure of it being the most expensive film yet produced in Japan — it’s also the one least amenable […]

Sergei Bondarchuk directed an 8‑hour film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–67), which ended up winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. When he was in Los Angeles as a guest of honor at a party, Hollywood royalty like John Wayne, John Ford, and Billy Wilder lined up to meet the Russian filmmaker. But the […]

Of the three collaborations jazz singer Cab Calloway made with cute cartoon legend Betty Boop, this 1933 Dave Fleischer-directed “Snow White” is probably the most successful. It certainly is the most strange—more hallucinatory than the first in the series “Minnie the Moocher”, and less slapstick-driven than “The Old Man of the Mountain.” It is a […]

“Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature. “But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art.” When, “as in the immortal […]

Happy New Year! We can now “do to Disney what Disney did to the great works of the public domain before him,” according to Harvard law professor and public domain expert, Lawrence Lessig, hailed by The New Yorker as “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era.” On January 1, Mickey Mouse […]