Black Lamb

September 2003 in Black Lamb

Volume 1, Number 9 — September 2003

September 1st, 2003

READ THIS ENTIRE ISSUE IN THE ENTRIES BELOW

The All-Movie Issue

In this special issue in which the Black Lamb writers are asked to recall life-changing films, Terry Ross remembers those snuggly drive-ins when he was a callow teenager (I Didn’t Lose It at the Movies). In our page 2 feature, Magnificent Perfection, Cate Garrison nominates her best movie of all time: The Magnificent Seven. In The Thing Is… Michele Gendelman documents the horror of the first mainstream movie to depict the arrival of extra-terrestrial life on earth. Stephen Starbuck salutes the oozey creepiness of Alien in Illiberal Aliens. In Trial by Fire, Gillian Wilce recalls the shattering first movie she even saw, at the age of three: Bambi.

Ed Goldberg (Hope and Despair) finds moral touchstones in two film classics: Casablanca and The Third Man. Attorney Bud Gardner posits The Lawyer as Hero in To Kill a Mockingbird. In On Location, Alan Albright remembers his personal experience in the film industry. Writing from Rome, Andrew Darrel (Italians and Turks) laments that Italians have accepted a view of their country formed by foreigners. In Escape from “escape” Dan Peterson wonders what happened to stories and “reality” in the movies. Steffen Silvis uncovers a novel by a film bombshell in Harlow with a “t.” Emily Emerson raises a toast to a film from 1979 made almost entirely without dialogue: The Black Stallion. In Hail Caesar! Jim Patton salutes cinema’s original hard guy, Edward G. Robinson. Rebecca Owen (Absolutely Addicted) is sure that films have given her a great sense of contemporary history. In The Thing redux, Doug Rennie shivers again just thinking about that great horror feature. Lane Browning makes her case for the glories of Kevin Costner’s Waterworld in Wet Is Beautiful. In A Global Embarrassment, Greg Roberts says that only comedies are worthy watching. Penitentiary inmate Dean Suess (The Language of Me) is shocked to find his own life on screen in The Lost Language of Cranes. In Invaders R Us, Gene Ryder can’t shake the memory of Invaders from Mars. David Maclaine admires the fable-like Pleasantville in Roads to Rebellion. In How I Became an Artist, Clinton Wilson describeS the genesis of his own visual artistic movement, called Post-painterly Projectivist Primitivism (3Pee for short). Our language maven Joel Hess remembers One Balmy Night in Singapore when, for the first time, he understood a foreign language in film: The Towering Inferno. In our Honorary Black Lambs column, we enumerate the great figures of literature born in September. A Literary Sampler offers excerpts from the works of nine authors mentioned in this month’s issue. In Behind That Curtain, Carol Wolfe chronicles the hilarious behind-the-scenes story of The Wizard of Oz. Our Black Lamb Recipe offers a formula for Armenian Lamb Stew. And Reg Arcati, Jr. supplies another challenging Black Lamb Cryptic Crossword.

Posted by: The Editors
Category: Month summaries, All Movie Issue, Movies | Link to this Entry