The Big Picture MagazineAlex Udvary is a Chicago-based freelance movie critic and entertainment writer. He has contributed to various websites and newspapers such as Nostalgia Digest Magazine, The Budapest Times, and Chicago News. All of his writings can be read on his blog at alex-udvary.blogspot.com
Comedian and director Carl Reiner’s second directorial feature-length film, The Comic (1969), starred Dick Van Dyke as a fictitious silent film era comedian, Billy Bright. Bright, an over bearing, egocentric comic, never reached the level of fame he believed he should have, always falling victim to the behavior of others like his wife (and co-star) […]
The great French director Francois Truffaut won an Academy Award for Day For Night (1972), a behind the scenes look at the making of a movie. Its romanticised view of filmmaking may have led the public to wonder – how difficult can it be to direct a movie? It sounds like fun. You will make […]
“I really couldn’t respect a man unless he were a great swimmer,” says Alice Brandon (Ginger Rogers) to Joe Holt (Joe E. Brown) in Lloyd Bacon’s comedy You Said A Mouthful (1932). A common feature of screen comedies in the 1920s and ’30s was social commentary on masculinity, with comedians often cast as shy, timid […]
Federico Fellini’s films often present a caricaturist view of society by magnifying our faults, a trait which is particularly distinct in Orchestra Rehearsal (1978), a film with an unusually strong political message from the Italian filmmaker. The movie presents itself as a faux documentary, with a television crew filming an orchestra’s rehearsal. When the musicians enter an […]
He’s the greatest jazz guitarist in the world except for a “gypsy in France”, declares Emmet Ray (Sean Penn), the subject of Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999), a fictitious docu-comedy about a talented musician forgotten by history. Emmet is not a likeable character. He is unfaithful, a kleptomaniac and an egomaniac. On the surface, […]
As with the main character in Homer’s Odyssey, from whom Ulysses’ Gaze (1997) gets its name, Theo Angelopoulos’ sadly forgotten 1995 film follows another tragic figure on his journey home. A filmmaker named ‘A’ (believed to stand for Angelopoulos) tells a story of how he once took a photograph of a landscape, only for the […]