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Is the Biopic Obsolete?
Biopics, or biographical pictures, were once big business in Hollywood. With The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Life of Emile Zola and Juarez, Paul Muni cemented his legacy as the biopic’s number one...
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The 15th Sarasota Film Festival: A Must for Movie Lovers
A perk to living in a small city populated by art lovers is a film festival with all the advantages that such an event offers with none of the disadvantages that plague big-city fests. The Sarasota...
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Love Streams: To the Wonder, Upstream Color and Spring Breakers
To the Wonder, Upstream Color and Spring Breakers have been speaking to each other in my head. I would rather they go away so I could do my taxes, but here we are. Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder,...
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Better Than The Movie That’s Better
I’m not even sure I understand what I’m about to ask but here goes: Have you ever watched a movie that was better than another movie but you thought the movie that’s not as good as the better movie is...
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Lon Chaney Jr. – Lady Killer
I recently set aside some time to watch all six of Universal’s Inner Sanctum Mystery films starring Lon Chaney Jr. Seeing these relatively short (60-67 minute) B-movies back to back over a couple of...
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The education of Arthur Holmwood
The consensus among Hammer horror fans and genre know-it-alls seems to be that Michael Gough’s performance in DRACULA (US: HORROR OF DRACULA, 1958) is the film’s one black mark, a detriment to what...
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Oops, my bad
Every week my blog postings here are riddled with errors. Most of them are spelling glitches that I would like to blame on Apple, and my habit of writing these on my iPad with the aggressive...
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TO LAUGH, TO CRY, TO SAY GOODBYE.
Last week the film series I program was graced by a visit from Eric Stough, the animation director for South Park. He was kind enough to let me select a recent episode for him to both screen and then...
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A Head’s Up on Some Terrific Documentaries from the Sarasota Film Festival
“Film festivals are the dominant way to see films like this,” noted documentary filmmaker A.J. Schnack , whose film We Always Lie to Strangers turned out to be my favorite doc of the recent Sarasota...
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Scent of Desperation: Whiffs and I Will, I Will…For Now
Since its inception Hollywood has been the plaything of the super rich, an ideal medium for ego stroking and favor doling. William Randolph Hearst famously bankrolled the career of his talented...
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When the Actor becomes a Persona
Having studied theater for years, and performing in many a play, I have always had a fascination with actors who become personas. There are character actors who take on a thousand different roles in...
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Comic Relief with Artists and Models (1955)
This has been a rough week. And when the bad news starts to outweigh the good I like to escape my worries with a great comedy that makes me laugh out loud and allows me to forget my troubles for a few...
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Paradise still lost but Sexcula found!
And I quote… (In) 1973, a horror-porn film called SEXCULA went before the cameras. Costing something in the neighborhood of $85,000, SEXCULA was credited to a director named “Bob Hollowich” (actually...
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How I Ruined Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Once upon a time, I helped ruin a movie. This is overstating things a bit–my contribution to this movie was so slight that I didn’t even appear in the closing titles, which are otherwise so detailed as...
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Straight to the Moon! (When the Science was all the Fiction Needed)
With the release of Oblivion, and its plot point of the moon’s destruction, I was reminded of a piece I wrote a couple of years ago for a DVD company about George Pal and one of the things I mentioned...
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Film Fest Favorites: The Ties that Bind
I saw three of the best narrative feature films I have seen all year at the Sarasota Film Festival, and two of them are getting a theatrical release, which means other viewers will be able to catch...
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Non-Lethal Weapon: Jackie Chan’s Police Story (1985)
“Nobody can beat Bruce Lee, everybody can beat me” -Jackie Chan Failing as a stoic Bruce Lee clone early in his career, Jackie Chan discovered that audiences preferred him as a cheery masochist,...
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No Pan Alley
I’ve been writing for some time now and in the last decade or so of feverish online opinion, I’ve learned a couple of things about myself and others when it comes to discussing films. One, I’ve...
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Telefilm Time Machine – Frankenstein: The True Story (1973)
Film buffs tend to have obsessions. We fuss and fawn over particular actors and directors while attempting to see everything they ever appeared in or produced. One of my own personal obsessions isn’t...
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Out of office reply
I hope you’ll forgive my absence from the blog today but I’m off covering the 4th TCM Film Festival in Hollywood. You can follow my reporting at the official festival website and live blog, where my...
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