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…
Just back from the 2017 TCM Classic Movie Festival with a few thoughts and thoughts about thoughts. I certainly held my reservations about this year’s edition, and though I ultimately ended up tiring early of flitting about from theater to theater like a mouse in a movie maze (it happens to even the most fanatically…
“It’s the most wonderful time/Of the year…” – Andy Williams Well, yes and no. There is, after all, still about a week and a half to go before we can put the long national, annual nightmare of the tax season behind us. But it’s also film festival season, which for me specifically means the onset…
A few years ago, in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the death of influential film critic Pauline Kael, I wrote the following: “I think (Kael) did a lot to expose the truth… that directors, writers and actors who often work awfully close to the surface may still have subterranean levels of achievement or purpose…
In 1997 there came a little movie called Trainspotting, adapted by director Danny Boyle and scenarist John Hodge from Scottish writer Irvine Welsh’s novel of the same name. It was the loose-limbed story of a group of childhood friends spinning their collective wheels in the working-class gloom of Edinburgh, Scotland, scheming schemes, committing petty crimes,…
So, going into the final stretch before the Oscars are announced, I have a question: if you like—no, love this year’s front-running La La Land, does that make you a bad person, or just deluded? Don’t laugh—there may be people at your own Oscar party who will have already come to their own conclusion on…
One of the most unusual, and unusually moving swansongs in cinema history, Josef Von Sternberg’s Anatahan (a.k.a. The Saga of Anatahan) returns to American screens this spring in a new restoration which seems destined not to only buff up the movie’s obvious visual splendor but also its standing as an essential and fully engaged work…
Nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be. When the poster for American Graffiti (1973) asked the question “Where were you in ’62?” it was marketing a trend, spiked by the increasing popularity of the theatrical musical Grease, for audiences of a certain age to look backward to a time when life wasn’t ostensibly so…
Even when you live in Los Angeles, as I do, if you’re not in the network of critics groups and press screening and screener DVDs it can be a challenge to keep up with everything you tell yourself you have to see before attempting an informed roundup of the year currently in the rearview mirror….
2016: the reviews are in! And they have been for quite some time, actually. If you keep up even a distracted presence on social media you’ll be well aware that the year past is largely considered at the very least a bad patch, and in thinking of it as something more than an isolated phenomenon…
I’m guessing that you, just like most of us, have always had seasonal favorites when it comes to movies that attempt to address and evoke the spirit of Christmas. Like most from my generation, when I was a kid I learned the pleasures of perennial anticipation of Christmastime as interpreted by TV through a series…
Much has been said and written about the receiving and processing of music as a spiritual experience, either in the religious sense, as a way of attempting a connection with God, or in terms of feeling the lift to one’s emotions, the rush of excitement that a great piece of music well-played can offer to…
Thanksgiving. After the past year of tumult, anger and divisiveness we’ve experienced in this country and around the world, to say nothing of the past couple of weeks, the concepts of thankfulness and appreciation may seem somewhat more distant and difficult to access than they might otherwise normally be. At any rate, Thanksgiving Day itself…
From the first time I saw it until this moment, two days before what might just be the most important, potentially resonant (for good and ill) American presidential election since the days of the Civil War, no other movie has expanded in my view more meaningfully, more ambiguously, with more fascination than has Robert Altman’s…
Yesterday, amid a crush of sweaty people desperate for last-minute props, I visited a local Halloween superstore with my daughter, looking for a Pikachu mask. Well, there wasn’t much to choose from in the Cute Kid Division. But this particular hall of Halloween hell definitely had the adult sensibility covered. Of course there were the…
Ten years ago I attended the Lone Pine Film Festival for the first time. It was the 17th annual celebration in 2006 of a festival dedicated to the heritage of movies (mostly westerns, but plenty of other genres as well) shot in or near the town of Lone Pine, California, located on the outer edges…
Vin Scully, the voice of the Dodgers, is calling it a career this weekend after 67 years in the booth. If you will indulge me, I’d like to tell you about one of my favorite moments from Scully behind the microphone, and about one night at Dodger Stadium that will make me miss him even…
This fall semester I started taking an Italian language class two evenings a week with my daughter, and Thursday night I was looking to decompress after our first big quiz. (Scores haven’t been revealed yet, but I think we did just fine.) So I started rummaging through my shelves and came across the Warner Archives…
GENE WILDER 1933 -2016 In all likelihood, the events of this past week probably didn’t offer any more or less sadness and pain to be distributed among willing and unwilling recipients, a.k.a. all of us currently participating in the game of Life. It’s a strange, unsettling time to bear status as a citizen of the…
11 DRIVE-IN MOVIE MOVIES (in alphabetical order): Blue Thunder (1983) One key sequence in this thriller about a high-tech urban surveillance helicopter is staged (during the daylight hours) at the Pickwick Drive-in in Burbank, California, which was razed in 1990. The Pickwick, due to its proximity to the local movie studios, hosted many movie premieres,…
Of all the companies that produced pictures primarily for the drive-in market, none did so with as much brio or thrived because of that market with quite the tenacity and bravado of American International Pictures. Founded by former film salesman James H. Nicholson and an entertainment lawyer by the name of Samuel Z. Arkoff, AIP…
It might seem that celebrating the drive-in movie season during the dog days of August is a celebration that is coming about two, maybe three months too late. Isn’t summer just about wrapped up? Ha! Only if you’re in still in grade school—my kids went back to their respective halls of education on August 8!…
The sound of an electric pencil sharpener masks the crack of a shot that initiates what might have been the perfect murder in Louis Malle’s debut film, Elevator to the Gallows (1958), now touring theaters in a gorgeous 4K digital restoration courtesy of Rialto Pictures. Malle’s movie, distinct from the more naturalistic comedies and dramas…
I’ve been back from my Oregon vacation for a couple of weeks now, and though the getaway was a good and necessary one, I’m still in the process of mentally unpacking from a week and a half of relaxing and thinking mostly only about things I wanted to think about. (I also discovered a blackberry…
In the hierarchy of significance in what made news this past week, the sudden availability of the entirety of Albert Brooks’ output of feature films as a writer-director via Netflix Streaming may not carry the urgency of, say, the alarming continuance of African-American deaths under police fire, the attack on a peaceful protest against police…