Author Archives: Jaime N. Christley

Auteurist Guide to Hulu Plus

Here are some directors of note whose films are viewable on Hulu Plus’s Criterion channel. Avid home mediaphiles will note massive discrepancies between what Criterion has released on take-home-from-the-store media (laserdisc, DVD, Blu-ray) and what you can watch on Hulu … Continue reading

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Streamageddon: 3.8% Less Bad Than We Thought

In a purge of catalog titles so epic it caught the attention of the likes of Gothamist, et al, Netflix seemed to hollow out their library of “old movies.” Since the day before what was dubbed, variously, as “Streamageddon” and … Continue reading

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Filmmakers Missing from Netflix Instant

Pretty self-explanatory. I put a little note next to the name if at least one of their features is found on Warner Archive (WA) or Hulu (H):

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Auteurist Guide to Warner Archive Instant

Warner Archive Instant is second only to Hulu in target-marketing to cinephiles. Hopefully they will continue to add more quality features – more Lang, more Joseph H. Lewis, Ford, Aldrich, and so on. Here are some key filmmakers represented as … Continue reading

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Auteurist Guide to Netflix, or Houses Built on Shifting Sands

This list has been updated following “Streamageddon” aka “Netflixocalypse,” or whatever you want to call the great purge of 5/1/2013, when nearly 2,000 titles were withdrawn from streaming on Netflix Instant. Most of the casualties were catalog titles. Withdrawn titles … Continue reading

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Dario Argento (An Introduction)

As his one-time collaborator Sergio Leone had already done with the western, giallo icon Dario Argento rehabilitated a depressed genre (horror) using new and improved tools available to European filmmakers in what was, at the time, a fairly new set of … Continue reading

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Hal Ashby (An Introduction)

When you talk about Hal Ashby “the auteur,” the elephant in the room is always going to be his decline and unemployability through the 1980s, brought on by heavy drug use; he passed away in 1988, at the age of … Continue reading

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George Armitage (An Introduction)

A more inscrutable major figure in  contemporary American cinema is hard to imagine. One of the less-heralded, but more vital, beneficiaries of Roger Corman’s tutelage at New World Pictures, George Armitage has only directed seven pictures to date, from Private Duty … Continue reading

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Michelangelo Antonioni (An Introduction)

Like Bergman, the commentary that surrounds the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, itself substantial enough to fill a library, often threatens to smother the fact that there’s a subject even to be discussed in the first place. Coming to grips with … Continue reading

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Kenneth Anger (An Introduction)

A mile-high stack of acetate slides, superimposing, swapping out, and combining images of death, sex, Hollywood, the occult, material fetish, shiny baubles, and ribald pranksterism: in its eighth decade, Kenneth Anger’s work remains resolutely home-brewed, even when collaborating with the … Continue reading

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