“I hate dolls,” writer-director Lagueria Davis states early in her debut documentary “Black Barbie.” By turns a celebration and an interrogation (sometime both simultaneously), the film delves into the history of the titular Black doll Mattel released in 1980. That was 31 years after the first Barbie began her rise to becoming the most iconic, uncomfortably influential, doll in American history. Davis makes a jam-packed argument that the road to Barbie diversity and inclusion has been long and marked by detours, intersections and, maybe a dead end or two. Davis’ first-person, inflected journey — often witty, often weighty — will lead her to a reconsideration of her antipathy (which she attributed to being a tomboy). Her reason for this rethink is personal — and adorable.
In 1953, Legueria’s aunt Beulah Mae Mitchell made her way from Forth Worth, Texas, to Los Angeles. She landed a job at Mattel in 1955. She left in 1999. Archival photos of...
In 1953, Legueria’s aunt Beulah Mae Mitchell made her way from Forth Worth, Texas, to Los Angeles. She landed a job at Mattel in 1955. She left in 1999. Archival photos of...
- 5/1/2023
- by Lisa Kennedy
- Variety Film + TV
Ronnie Lee refused to eat pork. “Swine,” he said, “was unclean.”
My oldest cousin was never particularly religious. In fact, the only time I ever recall Ronnie Lee in the pews of a church was for various family funerals and weddings, where he often came dressed to the nines with high-shined Stacy Adams and silk-brimmed, fedora hat festooned with a peacock feather like he was headed to a Player’s Club ball. Once, days after somebody plastered his backside with a hail of buckshots in a botched robbery, he came...
My oldest cousin was never particularly religious. In fact, the only time I ever recall Ronnie Lee in the pews of a church was for various family funerals and weddings, where he often came dressed to the nines with high-shined Stacy Adams and silk-brimmed, fedora hat festooned with a peacock feather like he was headed to a Player’s Club ball. Once, days after somebody plastered his backside with a hail of buckshots in a botched robbery, he came...
- 11/6/2022
- by Goldie Taylor
- Rollingstone.com
Ronnie Lee refused to eat pork. “Swine,” he said, “was unclean.”
My oldest cousin was never particularly religious. In fact, the only time I ever recall Ronnie Lee in the pews of a church was for various family funerals and weddings, where he often came dressed to the nines with high-shined Stacy Adams and silk-brimmed, fedora hat festooned with a peacock feather like he was headed to a Player’s Club ball. Once, days after somebody plastered his backside with a hail of buckshots in a botched robbery, he came...
My oldest cousin was never particularly religious. In fact, the only time I ever recall Ronnie Lee in the pews of a church was for various family funerals and weddings, where he often came dressed to the nines with high-shined Stacy Adams and silk-brimmed, fedora hat festooned with a peacock feather like he was headed to a Player’s Club ball. Once, days after somebody plastered his backside with a hail of buckshots in a botched robbery, he came...
- 11/6/2022
- by Goldie Taylor
- Rollingstone.com
From Bond to Indiana Jones to Game of Thrones, Julian Glover has starred in some of the biggest franchises ever. As he appears with Russell Crowe in Prizefighter, the great actor spills his secrets
‘Ok,” says Julian Glover. “We talk to each other for an hour. And you extract what you want, as long as it’s nice.” We’re sitting in a cafe in Barnes, London, and it is all a little surreal. Glover, now 87, is so vividly recognisable from The Empire Strikes Back, in which he played villainous General Veers, that it’s like teleporting back to the 1980s. In fact, to look at, he seems to have altered almost not at all between starring in 1967 film Quatermass and the Pit and, say, playing the baddie in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade two decades later. What’s more, you would have easily picked him out as Grand...
‘Ok,” says Julian Glover. “We talk to each other for an hour. And you extract what you want, as long as it’s nice.” We’re sitting in a cafe in Barnes, London, and it is all a little surreal. Glover, now 87, is so vividly recognisable from The Empire Strikes Back, in which he played villainous General Veers, that it’s like teleporting back to the 1980s. In fact, to look at, he seems to have altered almost not at all between starring in 1967 film Quatermass and the Pit and, say, playing the baddie in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade two decades later. What’s more, you would have easily picked him out as Grand...
- 7/19/2022
- by Zoe Williams
- The Guardian - Film News
Very few people can pull off wearing a navy blue pinstripe suit paired with a dark lined open-neck shirt. Yet not everyone is Peter Greenaway. The veteran British director, an intriguing, eloquent and eminently likeable subject, has been based in Amsterdam for the last twenty years. In a conversation as eclectic as his latest film, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, he spoke with CineVue's Matt Anderson about his admiration for the cinema of Sergei Eisenstein, intertextuality, film as propaganda, nudity and Donald Duck.
Matt Anderson: What is your earliest recollection of watching an Eisenstein film? Peter Greenaway: I was 15 - we're talking 1957. At the bottom end of Leytonstone there was a little grubby cinema called The State and it became our sort of Mecca. When you're a 15 year old adolescent you're very, very keen to see a naked woman and the chances are you're not going to see it in English cinema,...
Matt Anderson: What is your earliest recollection of watching an Eisenstein film? Peter Greenaway: I was 15 - we're talking 1957. At the bottom end of Leytonstone there was a little grubby cinema called The State and it became our sort of Mecca. When you're a 15 year old adolescent you're very, very keen to see a naked woman and the chances are you're not going to see it in English cinema,...
- 4/20/2016
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
Angelina Jolie takes on Sleeping Beauty while Terry Gilliam tackles Berlioz as the stars come out to confound our expectations in the coming year
Film
Angelina Jolie in Maleficent
Hollywood's most formidable leading lady is back after a relatively quiet spell, in a role playing on her scariness and seniority. This reinvented fairytale is a twist on The Sleeping Beauty, and Jolie is not playing the insipid dormant heroine with her crybaby attitude to finger-pricking but the evilly magnificent Maleficent, the sorceress who casts a spell on the demure young Princess Aurora. How did she get that way? Everything will depend on the script – but Jolie is always a great turn. Peter Bradshaw 30 May.
Natalie Portman in Jane Got a Gun
Natalie Portman is a Hollywood A-lister who first came to prominence in George Lucas's Star Wars prequel trilogy. She was compellingly vulnerable in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan,...
Film
Angelina Jolie in Maleficent
Hollywood's most formidable leading lady is back after a relatively quiet spell, in a role playing on her scariness and seniority. This reinvented fairytale is a twist on The Sleeping Beauty, and Jolie is not playing the insipid dormant heroine with her crybaby attitude to finger-pricking but the evilly magnificent Maleficent, the sorceress who casts a spell on the demure young Princess Aurora. How did she get that way? Everything will depend on the script – but Jolie is always a great turn. Peter Bradshaw 30 May.
Natalie Portman in Jane Got a Gun
Natalie Portman is a Hollywood A-lister who first came to prominence in George Lucas's Star Wars prequel trilogy. She was compellingly vulnerable in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan,...
- 1/1/2014
- by Peter Bradshaw, Tim Jonze, Sean O'Hagan, Mark Lawson, Andrew Dickson, Lyn Gardner, Jonathan Jones, Adrian Searle, Tom Service, Andrew Clements
- The Guardian - Film News
"First shown in 1972, John Berger's BBC television series Ways of Seeing radicalized the way an entire generation looked at art," writes Jackie Wullschlager in the Financial Times:
Before Berger, painterly detail, the development of a style, attributions and authentications, were the tools of an art historian's trade, and those practicing it most successfully in the 20th century — Bernard Berenson in the splendor of his Florentine villa, Kenneth Clark, who bought himself Saltwood Castle in Kent and was knighted for his stately TV series Civilisation — had always been unashamedly elitist in both their work and their lives. Then came Berger, born in Hackney, east London, in 1926, educated not at Harvard or Oxford but at London art schools, hanging out not with collectors and dealers but with the revolutionary Black Panther Party, to which he donated half the money from his 1972 Booker Prize-winning experimental novel G., about a rich Italian's journey to class consciousness.
Before Berger, painterly detail, the development of a style, attributions and authentications, were the tools of an art historian's trade, and those practicing it most successfully in the 20th century — Bernard Berenson in the splendor of his Florentine villa, Kenneth Clark, who bought himself Saltwood Castle in Kent and was knighted for his stately TV series Civilisation — had always been unashamedly elitist in both their work and their lives. Then came Berger, born in Hackney, east London, in 1926, educated not at Harvard or Oxford but at London art schools, hanging out not with collectors and dealers but with the revolutionary Black Panther Party, to which he donated half the money from his 1972 Booker Prize-winning experimental novel G., about a rich Italian's journey to class consciousness.
- 4/3/2012
- MUBI
Civilisation
Blu-ray, 2 Entertain
Out on 9 May
Historian Kenneth Clark introduces this landmark documentary series with a quote from John Ruskin about how the key to understanding a great nation is to look at their deeds, words and art, the last being "the only trustworthy one".
So begins an epic voyage around the historical culture of western civilisation, taking in the greats such as Da Vinci, Mozart, Dante, Shakespeare, etc, working backwards from their art to discover how it was formed by their lives. Overseen by David Attenborough (when he was head of BBC2) and still as bright and informative as it was when first transmitted in 1969, Civilisation has yet to be bettered. Shot on film (the remastered Blu-ray looks stunning) and in colour (when most TV sets were still black and white), it's a precursor to many of the great shows from the golden era of factual TV such as Life On Earth,...
Blu-ray, 2 Entertain
Out on 9 May
Historian Kenneth Clark introduces this landmark documentary series with a quote from John Ruskin about how the key to understanding a great nation is to look at their deeds, words and art, the last being "the only trustworthy one".
So begins an epic voyage around the historical culture of western civilisation, taking in the greats such as Da Vinci, Mozart, Dante, Shakespeare, etc, working backwards from their art to discover how it was formed by their lives. Overseen by David Attenborough (when he was head of BBC2) and still as bright and informative as it was when first transmitted in 1969, Civilisation has yet to be bettered. Shot on film (the remastered Blu-ray looks stunning) and in colour (when most TV sets were still black and white), it's a precursor to many of the great shows from the golden era of factual TV such as Life On Earth,...
- 4/29/2011
- by Phelim O'Neill
- The Guardian - Film News
One of the greatest, and most influential of all TV documentary mini-series is the 1969 classic of televised art history Civilisation: writer-narrator Kenneth Clark’s survey of western art and its meaning and impact throughout the ages -- beginning in The Dark Ages and progressing through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Age of Reason to the Twentieth Century.
- 4/7/2010
- Movie City News
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