“Sunset at Monument Valley–the only place I’ve ever seen where night rises instead of falls. The stagecoach stop where Shirley Temple catches John Agar with his shirt off in Fort Apache is 20 feet away from me; the stone cabin that served as John Wayne’s quarters in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is just behind…
Okay, okay, I’ll go see DARKEST HOUR! Jeez! The first thing that struck me as I mused in the glow of the announcement of the Oscar nominations Tuesday morning, specifically about the Best Picture nominees, is that outside of not yet having seen the film mentioned above, I don’t have a problem with the presence…
Last week I made my way out of the Facebook forest and decided to take a brief hiatus from the constant barrage of input, positive as well as negative, and try to clear my head a little. I’ve already pretty much abandoned Twitter for the same reasons (How do all you Twitterers have the time…
When I was a kid I was lucky enough to have a few friends who shared many of my interests– in movies, music, movie monsters, comic books, drama, and other sorts of things that ensured we were forever categorized as “nerds.” (Whatever the modern equivalent of “Nerd” classification is, it doesn’t seem to be quite…
I don’t get out as much as I used to, and notice of that fact is certainly meant to include the frequency with which I make it out to the theater to see a movie. I think it’s because we find ourselves in what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, the Netflix Age…
It feels a little bit like Christmas morning around the house this morning, even though we’ve still got a week and change to go before the actual day, and that’s undoubtedly because all the women here are rousing themselves a bit early to get ready for what amounts to Christmas 2017, Hollywood style. (The cats…
Hal Ashby’s The Landlord, made in 1970, is probably the best movie of the 1970s not to be widely known by younger audiences, and even by some older audiences whose appreciation of the last great era of American moviemaking needs to be expanded beyond go-to classics like The Godfather and Chinatown and Taxi Driver. It’s…
I’d imagine every one of us, despite our individual life situations, however privileged or difficult they may be, wouldn’t have too much trouble coming up with a pretty long list of people and circumstances for which to be grateful, during the upcoming week traditionally reserved for the expression of thanks as well as throughout the…
Last night, at the tail end of a long and weird day, after all the rest of the folks who live with me were snug in bed, I shut off all the lights in the house, settled into my living room movie-watching chair and fired up a vintage Hammer classic I’d never seen before, The…
How often have you heard someone (usually a blurb whore, but sometimes someone you actually know) describe a movie as being “indescribable” or “unlike anything you’ve ever seen before”? And then you go see the alleged one-of-a-kind work and not only is it quite describable, it’s usually describable in terms of many things have come…
If you’re a baseball fan, particularly if you’re a Dodgers, Astros, Cubs or Yankees fan, the real baseball season started this past Friday with the inauguration of the American and National League Championship Series. I’m a Dodgers fan, which means I’m among that group who, arguably, have gone the longest without the satisfaction/excitement/nail-biting terror of…
Let’s talk memorable movie killers for a second. Since Mrs. Bates first slashed her way through the shower curtain in Room 1 of that roadside motel in Psycho (1960), franchise-minded murderers have had a hard time of it in the consistency department, regardless of how strong they may have lunged out of the gate. Established…
WARNING: The following piece was written without regard to the presence of “spoilers.” We see the interior of a quiet apartment. It is lit with the waning diffuseness of a grey afternoon, and there is a woman moving about its hallways with a steadiness of purpose. The camera which affords us this look into her…
Is it possible, in the grand age of visual and storytelling sophistication in which we live (the sarcasm is coming through, isn’t it?), to experience the exquisite delirium of an old Japanese kaiju movie, say, anything in the Godzilla-and-related-monsters series from roughly 1957 to 1975, without responding to it simply as inept camp, or as…
On Monday, August 28, 2017, Turner Classic Movies will devote an entire day of their “Summer Under the Stars” series to the late, great Louis Burton Lindley Jr. If that name doesn’t sound familiar, well, then just picture the fella riding the bomb like a buckin’ bronco at the end of Dr. Strangelove…, or the…
The history of the Muriel Awards stretches aaaalllll the way back to 2006, which means that this coming season will be a special anniversary, marking 10 years of observing the annual quality and achievement of the year in film. (If you don’t know about the Muriels, you can check up on that history here.) The…
It was only recently that I saw, for the very first time, Bryan Forbes’ adaptation of Mark McShane’s novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), and as it was designed to do, it chilled me to the bone. The movie descends like a shroud upon the lives of Myra (Kim Stanley), a would-be psychic who…
“All the films in this book share an air of disreputability… I have tried to avoid using the word art about the movies in this book, not just because I didn’t want to inflate my claims for them, but because the word is used far too often to shut down discussion rather than open it…
The United States is “my country, right or wrong,” of course, and I consider myself a patriotic person, but I’ve never felt that patriotism meant blind fealty to the idea of America’s rightful dominance over global politics or culture, and certainly not to its alleged preferred status on God’s short list of favored nations, or…
“This is Kent Dorfman. He’s a legacy from Harrisburg…” Like we all must, Stephen Furst, the actor who brought Kent Dorfman, a.k.a. the sweet, portly Delta Tau Chi pledge known as Flounder, to life, has passed away. It’d be hard to argue that Furst’s life wasn’t far too short—after all, he was only 63 years…
It’s kind of hard for me to undersell the impact Batman and Adam West had on me as a boy. I was six years old when the show premiered, and it was the first program I can remember seeing previews for and *begging* my mom to commit to letting me watch it when it finally…
A couple weeks ago I was musing on the 2017 summer movie road ahead and found myself coming up somewhat disappointed in the anticipation department by a season that seemed to have cornered a new and cynically celebrated market based almost entirely on the concept of recycling. Then, with only a smidgen of prompting, I…
God bless the Criterion Collection for their forthcoming Blu-ray of a nifty 2K restoration of The Breaking Point (1950), the second swipe at Ernest Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not, which is on the company’s release schedule for August 2017. You may have heard of the first version… Bogie, Bacall, Hawks, “You know how…
Five years ago this weekend Tim Burton’s updating of Dark Shadows, the gothic/horror-themed soap opera which ran from 1966 to 1971 on ABC and was a seminal influence on a generation of budding horror fans (including Burton), was released on American movie screens, one weekend after Marvel’s The Avengers was still dictating the imaginations (and…
Summer is upon us. That is, summer as defined by movie studios which, in the 40 years since Star Wars was released, on May 25, 1977, have valiantly tried to stretch the boundaries of summer, content-wise, from the traditional June-July-August definition to include the other nine months of the year as well. (Mission pretty much…
The pomp and circumstance of Felix Mendelssohn’s “War March of the Priests,” as played on a grand pipe organ by a hooded figure seated in an opulent ballroom during the opening credits of The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), perfectly sets the tone and timbre of director Robert Fuest’s film, both with playful irreverence and an…