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Muppet Love
I have something I need to say. It’s something I don’t say often enough, and for that I am sorry. You deserve to hear it. The words are few but powerful. I love you. I love you, Muppet Movie. The...
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Toxic Love a la Milanese
Milan, Italy is world famous as a mecca for high fashion, design and the AC Milan football club but the statistics also reveal that it is one of Europe’s most polluted cities, if not the worst, due to...
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Department Store Movies: A $ign of Our Times
Whether in the news, online, or around the water cooler, more attention was paid to Black Friday than to Thanksgiving this year. What used to be an unacknowledged tradition for mainstream America—women...
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Silents Please: Hugo and The Artist
In one of those serendipitous quirks of scheduling, two homages to the silent film era are opening at the same time. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, a 3D extravaganza adapted from Brian Selznick’s gorgeously...
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When the Bad Guys are the Good Guys
LET ALL WHO VENTURE FORTH BE WARNED: SPOILERS ABOUND! Over Thanksgiving break, I watched Topkapi with my wife and father-in-law and enjoyed it immensely. Neither my wife nor I really remembered it...
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Ken Russell: In His Own Words
Controversial film director Ken Russell passed away suddenly this week at the age of 84. Russell has long been considered the bad boy of British cinema or the original ‘enfant terrible’ of the empire,...
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What’s all this nonsense? THE INSPECTOR GENERAL, starring Danny Kaye, that’s...
While the leaves were changing color a couple of months ago, the good folks at Shout!Factory released the Warner Brothers Danny Kaye vehicle THE INSPECTOR GENERAL (1949) as a collector’s edition DVD....
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Seriously?
It’s been a little over a year since I debuted here, and in that time I’ve stirred up a handful of firestorms–but weirdly, not the ones I expected. I posted a clip of Buster Keaton as a sympathetic...
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THE END
In case you haven’t heard; 2012 will be known as the official date when most celluloid projection will be tossed into a fiery and remote pit. Film, “reel” film, the stuff made of organic emulsion that...
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On Watching Vertigo on the Big Screen in 35mm with an Audience
On a cold, blustery Chicago afternoon, I was safely tucked in the back row of a theater watching Vertigo as it was intended to be seen—on the big screen in 35mm with a theater full of movie buffs,...
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The Hand That Erases: Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988 – 1998)
It is now possible to hold Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema in your hand, after remaining a rumor in the years following its completion in 1998. It was caught in a snarl of copyright issues that...
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The Journeyman Who Won an Oscar
If you had asked me when I was just growing up on the movies in the mid to late seventies who was going to be the big director of the decade, I might have answered Franklin J. Schaffner. That wouldn’t...
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Favorite Film Related Books of 2011 (Part I.)
I enjoy reading about the movies I love almost as much as I enjoy watching them and this year I found myself doing a lot of reading. This was partially due to the fact that I’m more housebound lately...
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Shock Cinema and other delights
It’s always a pleasure when I find the new issue of Steven Puchalski’s Shock Cinema in the mailbox and I’m calling issue 41 an early Christmas gift this year. Because I write a lot about actors,...
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Fubar
As the saying goes, “#%*! happens.” This is true in moviemaking as much as any walk of life. Getting a large number of people to all march in rhythm and conform to a single agenda is a challenge under...
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Things Fall Apart
On first impressions this may look like just another grade B bank heist thriller but don’t be fooled. This 1957 independent pickup by United Artists is a genuine loose canon and highly peculiar within...
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Chasing After the Fox
I love those comedies from the Swinging 1960s that are part farce, part caper movie in which a huge international cast sashays through Europe in an incomprehensible plot. The cinematic equivalent to a...
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Home Video Roundup: Christmas Edition!
It’s that festive time of year again, when family ties are maintained through the ritualized exchange of fabrics, wrought plastics and optical discs. This joyous occasion ensures that husband and wife,...
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At One with Nature: Carroll Ballard’s One-Two Punch
Sometimes an artist succeeds in a way that dooms every future effort. The success either places undue expectations upon the audience for the artist’s future works or, in the worst case scenario, upon...
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Reading Into Robert Cornthwaite
My favorite mad scientist may just be Dr. Arthur Carrington, the hopelessly naive (but very dressy) ascot-, turtleneck-, and blazer-wearing trailblazer in The Thing From Another World (1951). Every...
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