BOLOGNA - In the early morning of November 2, 1975, in Idroscalo, a terminally dreadful shanty town in Ostia, outside Rome, the body of Pier Paolo Pasolini, then 53, an intellectual powerhouse and one of the greatest filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, was found badly beaten and run over by his own Alfa Romeo.... Read More

Even in his wild, stoned to death, easy rider cuckoo times, Jack Nicholson would never have imagined he would one day tag team with the First Lady of the United States to present an Oscar for Best Picture. This is more Hunter S Thompson than Academy territory - and hardly presidential. But it did -... Read More

The buzz in Los Angeles is that Argo will win this year’s Oscar for Best Picture. The Ben Affleck-directed CIA thriller has already won Best Picture at the Golden Globes, the Directors Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild and the Producers Guild. Only in Hollywood you can win Best Picture without the guy who... Read More

The Sheikh he drove his Cadillac He went a-cruisin' down the ville The Muezzin was a-standin' On the radiator grill The Clash, Rock the Casbah It's irrelevant. It may be a rockin' Hollywood thriller - an Osama/Obama double bill (directed by Kathryn "Hurt Locker" Bigelow). But the targeted assassination - allegedly with an iconic American... Read More

The United States lost the war in Vietnam - which, for the Vietnamese, is more appropriately known as the American War - on the ground. But Hollywood won the war on screen - displaying back-to-back masterpieces from Apocalypse Now to The Deer Hunter. Now history repeats itself as - what else - farce. The US... Read More