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First in Fear: Native Americans in Horror Films, pt. 2
Last week I kicked off my multi-part series of essays on Native Americans in Horror Films with a discussion of the key First Nation Fright Flick gimmick of sacred burial grounds and the violation of,...
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Suckers on the Screen and Suckers in the Audience
After purposely avoiding it for years due to its terrible reputation, my curiosity finally got the best of me when TCM aired TENTACLES (1977), following the stupefying ZAAT (1972) on Friday May 7th,...
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Casino Jack and the United States of Money
Director Alex Gibney came to prominence with an eye-opening look at financial corruption in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2006. He would go on to actually...
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It’s “Crash” Meets “In Bruges” and “Juno”…in Prague!
I work in the marketing department at Facets Multi-Media in Chicago. Part of the Facets operation is a vast videotheque, or video rentals store, which features thousands of foreign, indie, documentary,...
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Tangential Festival Notes! (Godard, Straub, Cronenberg)
A groggy John Huston welcomes you to today’s equally confused post. He’s an interview subject in Peter Lennon’s Rocky Road to Dublin (1967), an acidic documentary portrait of 1960s Ireland. Lennon...
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Borzage Through Fresh Eyes
Color me green with envy after reading all those positive reports from all over about the recent TCM Classic Film Festival. While giving friends who attended the third degree to extract every droplet...
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The Navy vs. The Night Monsters
Some films start out with the best intentions but due to budget cuts, editing, crew conflicts, miscasting and other factors, the final product ends up being much less than the sum of its parts. Over...
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First in Fear: Native Americans in Horror Films, pt. 3
At some point in the early 1970s, post the founding of the American Indian Movement (AIM), post-BILLY JACK (1971), post-Wounded Knee ’73, post-Sacheen Littlefeather, Native Americans began to percolate...
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Raymond Burr + Natalie Wood = Cute Couple
On screen in A CRY IN THE NIGHT (1956), he played the tormenter and she was his victim but offscreen the 38-year-old actor and the 17-year-old ingenue became close friends and possibly more during the...
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Drinking Games
Repertory film is a hard sell on campus, but last night I watched an advance screener for a multi-layered, black-and-white, French-Italian co-production that’s being re-released by Oscilloscope...
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Ruminating on Remakes: From Motion Pictures for Fans to Products for the...
Hollywood has always relied on remakes and reworkings of previous movie hits as a strategy to lure audiences to the theater. As far back as the silent era, directors and producers remade films to speak...
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Memorial Day Movies: They Were Expendable (1945)
“This isn’t going to be some goddamned two-bit propaganda flick.” -John Ford to Vice Admiral John Bulkeley, USN John Ford put off making They Were Expendable for over two years. He was busy with his...
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Hondo (1953): A Western with Dimension
“…a long time ago, I made me a rule. I let people do what they want to do.” I’m always surprised how many John Wayne films I’ve never seen. Not that seeing the young man playing Singin’ Sandy warbling...
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Introducing Laurence Harvey
A few weeks ago I wrote about Michael Mann’s last film A Dandy in Aspic, which features Laurence Harvey in one of his best roles. At the time I expressed how much I liked Harvey even though many...
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First in Fear: Native Americans in Horror Films, pt. 4
For this last installment of “First in Fear: Native Americans in Horror Films,” we turn to the subject of Helpful Indians – those shamans, scouts, sure-shots and spirit guides who help Anglos out of...
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Missed Cues
Everyone has seen them, but not everyone has noticed them. And even fewer fully understand the purpose of the circular scratches that appear about every twenty minutes in a film, like subliminal...
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Remembering Dennis Hopper
Dennis Hopper passed away yesterday morning at the age of 74 from complications related to prostate cancer (he’d been diagnosed with it late in 2009). That same morning I heard of the news from over 12...
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Clint Eastwood: Not an Auteur, but a Starteur
Clint Eastwood turns 80 years old today, though, with a film titled Hereafter in postproduction and one called Hoover in preproduction, he shows no signs of slowing down. Perhaps America’s most...
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The Rifleman (Guest Starring Dennis Hopper)
Fifty episodes of THE RIFLEMAN (1958 – 1963) are available for viewing on Hulu, and it’s a phenomenally rich show for auteurists (and everyone else). Sam Peckinpah was the lead writer (and directed two...
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Summer Time, and the Movie Is Silly
“Forgive me for being profound, but it’s good to be alive,” mumbles Troy Donahue to his date, Suzanne Pleshette, as Italian singer Emilio Pericoli warbles the reverberating “Al-Di-La,” in Rome...
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