Thanksgiving. The real inauguration of the holiday season in the United States, and in homes, countries, points and vast places all around the globe, seems to begin here. If all goes according to plan, each year we enter into it primed to consider and acknowledge the aspects of our lives that make it worth living,…
Gunnar Hansen was born in Reykjavik, Iceland on March 4, 1947, and he died this past weekend, on November 7, in his home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, from pancreatic cancer. In between those two dates he spent some of his formative years in Texas, where he worked as a bartender and a carpenter while attending…
The new movie Spotlight begins inside a South Boston police station in 1976, where a Catholic bishop is counseling a distraught mother who may or may not bring charges against the priest accused of molesting her son. According to the desk sergeant outside the witness room, the bishop is in the station to “help out,”…
Halloween doesn’t have to be over once the last trick-or-treater has crept back into the shadows of the night. You may still be possessed by the spirit of the holiday and in desperate need of some real scares. In an effort to address that need and help you find a choice that goes beyond the…
Halloween doesn’t have to be over once the last trick-or-treater has crept back into the shadows of the night. You may still be possessed by the spirit of the holiday and in desperate need of some real scares. In an effort to address that need and help you find a choice that goes beyond the…
Halloween doesn’t have to be over once the last trick-or-treater has crept back into the shadows of the night. You may still be possessed by the spirit of the holiday and in desperate need of some real scares. In an effort to address that need and help you find a choice that goes beyond the…
Over at my other haunt, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, there is currently posted, in honor of Halloween week, what I think are two very special treats (and possibly tricks). The first is a very challenging frame grab quiz in which readers are asked to guess the titles of 31 movies based on…
July 25, 1980. That was the day Dressed to Kill opened in theaters across the country, and it marked the first of countless times I would see the movie projected on a big screen, on a drive-in screen, panned and scanned for home video, even interrupted and cut to ribbons for network TV. But I’ll…
A look at the list of my favorite movies from 2014 reveals the presence of six extraordinary nonfiction films, and that’s just a taste of the seeming hundreds of docs released last year– not all of them extraordinary, of course, but all of them indicative of a trend toward the making of the availability of…
About five years ago I made my way over to Montana Street in Santa Monica to attend a screening of the magnificently loopy adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, directed by Paul Verhoeven, which was showing at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. The screening was a star-studded affair, featuring Verhoeven in an on-stage interview…
“This 1966 western… has the expertise of a cold old whore with practiced hands and no thoughts of love. There’s something to be said for this kind of professionalism; the moviemakers know their business and they work us over. We’re not always in the mood for love or for art, and this movie makes no…
For anyone who cringes at the words “found footage,” especially when applied to the recent glut of variable-quality horror movies like REC, V-H-S, Diary of the Dead, Cloverfield and the Paranormal Activity franchise, the idea of a scare picture taking place on, and entirely restricted to, the busily fragmented screen of a MacBook might just…
The three-year run of Hannibal, one of the most visually and narratively innovative series ever to air on television, broadcast or cable, came to a breathtaking conclusion Saturday night. I have already confessed to a bit of selfish melancholy that there will be no more surprises, no more opportunities to get lost in the show’s…
It’s 1940, and the Nazi invasion of France is fully under way. A mother, father, a five-year-old girl and her tiny dog are among a throng of refugees fleeing Paris and jamming roads across the French countryside while German planes drop bombs and strafe their path with a relentless rain of machine gun fire. Soon…
Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Ever since I came up with the quizzical, whimsical (quizzimsical?) name for my blog way back in 2004, I’ve been asked how I settled on such an odd one. The answer is fairly simple: as originally envisioned, I supposed that I would split blog time between writing about…
So here we are, smack dab in the middle of the dog days of summer (and if you don’t get that little saying, try lying out on the sidewalk in 100-degree heat for 15 minutes or so, like Fido does, and see if a light bulb doesn’t go off). The dogs are often howling in…
A long time ago, sometime around 1912, a director by the name of D.W. Griffith packed up his filmmaking wares and took his crew, including favored cinematographer Billy Bitzer and star Mae Marsh, across the water to a relatively mysterious island off the Southern California coast to shoot a short film. The project, Man’s Genesis,…
It’s definitely been a week for good-byes. My daughters and I spent the weekend in the beautiful, still somewhat quaint small town of Auburn, California, helping to lay to rest and celebrate the life of my dear aunt Mary Pascuzzi, my fraternal grandmother’s sister, who was the centered matriarch of her own family and a…
Early on in Irrational Man, Woody Allen’s latest half-narcotized attempt to dramatically grapple with a philosophically tinged moral crisis, a fellow academic tells Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix), “I loved your essay on situational ethics.” Abe, being a newly appointed professor/radical free thinker to the philosophy department of a picturesque Rhode Island college and himself awash…
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…
Burying the Ex, director Joe Dante’s feature-length expansion of screenwriter Alan Trezza’s 2008 short, doesn’t have much use for the zombie apocalypse, and the modestly budgeted, all-around-modest comedy is better for it. The movie trades in the current zeitgeist for all things undead, but it exchanges the gore and zombie-sociology of your average George A….
Ten years ago this summer five nerds and some members of their very patient families answered an ad listing on Drive-ins.com and gathered in the snack bar of the Mission Tiki Drive-in Theater in Montclair, California, for the first meeting of what would soon be known as the Southern California Drive-in Movie Society. There wasn’t much of…
It’s a Throwback Thursday behind the Velvet Curtain, and no, don’t expect a picture of me in a blue baby bonnet, or one in which I’m decked out in bad ‘70s prom gear. Today I just want to reflect for a moment about the cluster of significant birthdays that this week represents for fans of…
You can practically feel the whole drive-in history of revenge-oriented biker pictures come roaring up from behind and crashing through the beginning of George Miller’s 1980 original Mad Max, informing the movie’s every lunatic move and guiding it as it charts a change in trajectory for the course of business-as-usual action filmmaking to come. Even…
At this writing we are about a week away from May 20, 2015, which will mark an event that many of us, I believe, secretly imagined would never come. Oh, we knew it would, time being well enamored of the whole “marching on” thing, and impermanence pretty much being the coin of the physical realm….
With the leap from Siri to Samantha, the seductive and increasingly sentient computer program heard (but never seen) in Spike Jonze’s Her, seeming more surmountable with each new iteration of the iPhone, it seems only a matter of time before we find ourselves staring into the eyes of a replicant, looking for that tell-tale metallic…