“A frog and a bear, seeing America!” -Fozzie Bear, The Muppet Movie There was a time, not too long ago, when the world was swept up in full-on Muppet Mania. Adorable felt-and-foam constructions brought to convincing life by an array of artisans first overtook TV airwaves, then graduated to vinyl and celluloid. The excitement peaked…
Spoilers for all three Pet Sematary films abound throughout this review. Read on, if you dare. TFH Guru Mary Lambert‘s excellent, intense and darkly funny film adaptation of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary debuted on April 21st, 1989. 30 years later, it has terrified untold oodles of pet owners, who’ve no doubt pondered the lengths to…
Writer/director (and former Bathory drummer) Jonas Åkerlund’s new black metal murder dramedy Lords of Chaos has really stuck with this critic since I first saw it two weeks ago. The controversial true crime tale has plenty to say about the lives of fringe musicians, the dangers of toxic masculinity and groupthink, and the tenuous nature of friendships…
Author’s Note: Some spoilers populate this review, because it’s impossible to thoroughly appraise Misery without unpacking some of the film’s more macabre elements. The uninitiated are advised to watch the film ASAP, then return to this space. The most famous non-fiction line coined by the recently departed screenwriting genius William Goldman is undoubtedly “Nobody knows anything,” a…
If you could travel back in time and see me during the summer of ’68, you would not see any noticeable differences between May and September. But in 2018, I know that my experiences — especially those outlined in “Reckless Youth Pt. 3” — had a profound effect. I started taking the path I was…
OK, I’ll just say it, this was one of the best summers of my life. What’s happened so far? I had graduated from FLHS, met a new best friend: Ron Klein, worked for a week happily shoveling Chicken shit at a Kibbutz and now it was time to cut loose. The beaches of Haifa and…
PERSPECTIVE. Writing and telling these stories has given me perspective and an appreciation of why my story unfolded the way it did. This chapter begins with the last days of Fort Lee High School and two events, one at the very beginning and one at the very end, that explain a lot about feelings that…
Chapter 7, Part 2 of Music & Stories, “Reckless Youth” Today we’ll delve more deeply into the three musketeers of my reckless youth: Teddy Cohen, Eddie Cohen, and yours truly. I really want to tell you about what went on in my mind when I was daydreaming in Fort Lee High School. More than a…
Chapter 7, Part 1 of Music & Stories, “Reckless Youth” In writing all these chapters beginning with Chapter 6, I was surprised by how crazed and irresponsible I was!!! My daughters NEVER did anything that approached my hasty, impulsive, fool hardy and ill-advised behavior. There are so many stupefying stories of thrill-seeking that it takes…
Chapter 6 of “Music & Stories” is “My Least Favorite Year.” From Spring of 1965 to Spring 1966, I was in free fall. Like Guido’s dream in Fellini’s 8 & 1/2, I was barely tethered to earth and then I fell… only to wake up in a state of high anxiety. Getting into college, the…
John Carpenter’s immortal 1978 Halloween was never built to have one sequel, let alone eight (plus two movies in a remake series). Though it left us with Michael Myers still on the loose, an omnipresent, almost metaphysical boogeyman, in a lot of respects, the movie is utterly self-contained. The immediate threat of Myers has been quelled by…
Happy Halloween, Trailers From Hell miscreants! The latest Halloween film premiered stateside on October 19th to stellar reviews and brisk business, proving that this 40 year-old cinematic franchise, much like its signature character, refuses to die. Upon leaving their local theater, I’m sure several of the flick’s many, many millions of patrons had questions. Some…
Why does Fright Night, the 1985 vampire teen horror-comedy curio, endure as a great movie long past its expected sell-by date? Because writer/director Tom Holland’s Fright Night extends its core subject matter, vampiric transformation, into a studied allegory for the painful, violent uncertainty of adolescence. And because it unflinchingly tackles the two underlying themes at the…
Welcome to “Going Electric,” Music & Stories Chapter 5, Part 2. This story is one of the main reasons that I wanted to do this memoirs project. The three friends who set off with me to see Dylan that night in August of 1965 — Susan Miller, Leslie Maitland, and Dennis Benson — are very…
With Halloween fast approaching, this writer wanted to unpack one of his all-time favorite horror movies, Evil Dead II (a.k.a. Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn). The first time I beheld the original The Evil Dead (1981), I found myself utterly terrified by the movie’s grisly carnage, completely charmed by its obvious lo-fi origins, and wholly…
“Something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?” The first half of a two-parter: Chapter 5 of Music & Stories – “Hydrogen Jukebox.” The title is from an Allen Ginsberg poem. Part 2 next week is “Going Electric.” Hence the line from “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Chapter…
I was in the Class of 1966 at Fort Lee High School. Our team’s nickname was The Bridgemen because of our proximity to the George Washington Bridge (about a quarter mile). The nickname was apt, FLHS was a bridge to adult life. Yes I am an Unreliable Narrator, but I have always been so. Dennis…
I couldn’t let the passing of Marty Balin go by without playing all my Jefferson Airplane LPs. They were one of the first great live bands that I ever saw. I bought all their LPs on the day that they hit the stores. Working at the Fillmore East, I got to know him a little…
The title of the series for this chapter should be “Movies & Stories” because I share a lot of the movies that I loved growing up. My father Jack was a movie lover and an enthusiastic movie goer. He took me to my first foreign film “The World of Apu” and it changed my life….
Most of this episode takes place from 1961 to 1964, three years that shaped a lot of the world view of this privileged solipsistic adolescent. I also wanted to share my memories of my mother and my wonderful grandparents and their amazing escape from Poland and the Holocaust. And as always, there’s music, Music, MUSIC (stories)!
A couple of months back, I posted a Facebook video in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Fillmore East and I got a lot of nice responses. Same thing with my memories of The Who. I have been working on an autobiography for a lot of years, but those postings convinced me that rather…
I was very gratified by all the positive responses to my monologue of Fillmore East memories. While I was organizing my notes and trying to decide where to begin, a CD of The Who Live at the Fillmore East May 1968 arrived in the mail. I fired up the big stereo, cranked the volume to…
50 years ago, the Fillmore East opened. I was there the day it opened as a customer and many times after that – watching artists like Big Brother, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Hendrix, Sly, Traffic, The Who and so many more. Four months into the Fillmore East’s existence, I got a job as an usher,…
Like everyone else I know, I’ve been thinking about Aretha Franklin, and how much her music meant to me. There has been a national embrace of Aretha and what she stood for. Here’s one of my memories, one from Carole King, and a little music history. All Respect to Lady Soul (small correction – the…
TFH Fearless Leader Joe Dante very astutely tip-toes around Larry Cohen’s stylistic filmmaking identity early on in King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen. Dante notes, “I would hardly call him the John Cassavetes of exploitation movies, but he does have a certain raw, visceral, realistic style.” Indeed, Larry Cohen’s signature film, Q:…
All hail Cathy Yan – the writer-director of 2018’s Dead Pigs and just announced to helm Birds of Prey, D.C.’s spin-off of their box office smash, Suicide Squad, featuring that film’s break-out character, Harley Quinn (played by Margot Robbie). There’s been some commentary touting Cathy as the first female Asian/Asian American to direct a big-budget super hero film…