Ella Taylor

Ella Taylor is a free-lance film critic, book reviewer and feature writer living in Los Angeles.

Born in Israel and raised in London, Taylor taught media studies at the University of Washington in Seattle; her book Prime Time Families: Television Culture in Post-War America was published by the University of California Press.

Taylor has written for Village Voice Media, the LA Weekly, The New York Times, Elle magazine and other publications, and was a regular contributor to KPCC-Los Angeles' weekly film-review show FilmWeek.

'Before And After' Dinner, Andre Is Still Talking

Credit Cinema Guild

In his wife's new documentary, theatrical director Andre Gregory comes across as an eternal child, hooked on his capacity to enchant but rarely able to listen to anyone else.

By Ella Taylor

Originally published on Fri April 5, 2013 6:27 pm

In 1981, avant-garde theater director Andre Gregory collaborated with his friend Wallace Shawn and French filmmaker Louis Malle on an oddball project they called My Dinner with Andre.

Now enshrined as a classic — and one of the most-lampooned films in the history of American cinema — the movie is a talky two-hander in which Gregory (or someone very like him) gassed away about his globe-trotting adventures in spiritual enlightenment, while Shawn (or someone very like him) listened in disbelief, then grew entranced.

4:03 pm

Thu April 4, 2013

Past Pains, Buried Deep 'Down The Shore'

Credit Transmission Pictures

The mysterious Jacques (Edoardo Costa, left) upends Bailey's (James Gandolfini) life when he arrives in the latter's seaside New Jersey town in Down the Shore.

By Ella Taylor

If you want to tell a story, the professional tale-spinners say, make something happen.

That's true, but a happening can be defined as elastically as the teller needs it to be. Sometimes it's a shift in a character's inner landscape — a change in her responses to the common hurts and losses that she's lugged around from childhood — that moves us more than a third-act gunshot ever could.

4:08 pm

Thu March 21, 2013

An 'Admission' That Moms Might Not Know Best

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Credit David Lee / Focus Features

High-strung Princeton University admissions counselor Portia (Tina Fey) finds old love — and a surrendered child — when she visits the Vermont prep school where old schoolmate John (Paul Rudd) is a teacher.

Credit David Lee / Focus Features

Portia's mother, Susannah (Lily Tomlin), is an ardent feminist and seems to have ignored her struggling daughter for years.

By Ella Taylor

Half an hour into Paul Weitz's new comedy, Admission, it dawned on me that I was watching an Americanized About a Boy -- which admittedly was also directed by Weitz. Both movies are adapted from other people's novels; both cobble together families out of the waifs and strays of modern life.

But where About a Boy was both funny and wise about urban alienation, Admission settles for skin deep.

10:33 am

Thu March 14, 2013

Whatever Happened To The Real Gingers And Rosas?

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Credit A24

The '60s London of the unhappy adolescent Ginger (Elle Fanning, with Annette Bening's mentoring May) was more complicated than students Ginger's age understand today. Film writer Ella Taylor, who lived through that decade, came late to an understanding of the toll it took on young women like Ginger.

Credit Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

The 1963 nuclear disarmament demonstration known as the Aldermaston March, which culminated in a speech by the aristocratic British social critic Bertrand Russell, was characteristic of left-leaning activism in 1960s London. Film writer Ella Taylor (not pictured) participated in many such demonstrations in her youth.

By Ella Taylor

A few weeks ago, I asked a class of college undergraduates what the 1960s meant to them.

"That flower-power thing?" one young man volunteered brightly.

The further we get from that misunderstood decade, the more the many strands of its rebelliousness get reduced to a pop-culture T-shirt slogan, a cartoon strip starring tie-dyed youth with stoned eyes and floor-mop hair.

4:03 pm

Thu February 28, 2013

'Hava Nagila: The Movie' Pays Homage To Unlikely Jewish Touchstone

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Credit International Film Circuit

Young newlyweds are serenaded with the strains of "Hava Nagila." The unlikely origins of the popular Jewish standard are explored in Roberta Grossman's documentary feature Hava Nagila: The Movie.

Credit International Film Circuit

The film features interviews with and commentary from such notable entertainers as Harry Belafonte who have performed "Hava Nagila."

By Ella Taylor

Originally published on Sun March 3, 2013 7:47 am

I grew up on "Hava Nagila," and I'll admit it's not the catchiest of tunes. The ingenuous Hebrew lyrics ("Come! Let us rejoice and be happy!") don't wear well in our age of knowing irony and ennui.

Hip young Israelis wince at the very mention of the song, and for many Diaspora Jews, a few bars of the tune are all it takes to recall that excruciating moment late in a fancy wedding or bar mitzvah, when the band invites all remaining guests (tipsy uncles included) to kick up their heels — and then go home already.

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