Daily Archives: December 19, 2025

Recommended Reading: Adrian Martin’s MISE EN SCÈNE AND FILM STYLE: FROM CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD TO NEW MEDIA ART

MisenScene&FilmStyle

It’s a genuine pity that this remarkable new book — a kind of summation and extension of Adrian Martin’s work in film analysis and the history of film criticism in Australia, France, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. over the past two decades — is commercially available only at the whopping price of $80.75 on Amazon — or $76, if you’re willing to settle for a Kindle edition. As a longtime friend, colleague, and collaborator of Martin’s, I was fortunate enough to receive a free inscribed copy, but most of the rest of you will have to either shell out a fortune or wait for a softcover edition. All I can do now, really, having received this book only yesterday, is signal just a few of its many riches. Girish Shambu, Adrian’s irreplaceable coeditor at LOLA, has already posted a helpful summary of the book’s “four [interests] that animate the work” on his web site, so the most I can hope to do here is cite just a few treasured and brilliant passages that already have either sent me back to the films and texts being discussed or extended my current (re)reading and (re)viewing lists:

teaandsympathyG. Cabrera Infante writing in 1957 about Tea and Sympathy (Vincente Minnelli, 1956), pp, 6-7. Read more

High Attitude [TRUTH OR DARE & DICE RULES]

From the Chicago Reader (May 24, 1991). What prompted me to repost my thoughts about Andrew Dice Clay in 2017 was, oddly enough, the Summer issue of the French quarterly magazine Trafic, which arrived in yesterday’s mail and where the lead article, about our Madman-in-Chief, cites J. Hoberman’s excellent analysis of Trump, which alludes pertinently to Clay. — J.R.

TRUTH OR DARE

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Alek Keshishian

With Madonna.

DICE RULES

* (Has redeeming facet)

Directed by Jay Dubin

Written by Andrew Dice Clay and Lenny Shulman

With Andrew Dice Clay.

“I know I’m not the best singer or the best dancer. I’m interested in pushing other people’s buttons.”

— Madonna in Truth or Dare

“I have no tolerance for anyone or anybody.”

— Andrew Dice Clay in Dice Rules

Madonna’s Truth or Dare and Andrew Dice Clay’s Dice Rules are performance films about sex and defying taboos that are clearly conceived as statements from and about their stars. The movies are radically different, but they have a few things in common: an adolescent sense of outrage spurred by adolescent fans and energies, a postmodernist reliance on movie-star models, a preoccupation with narcissism and masturbation, and a painstaking effort on the part of their stars to “explain” themselves. Read more