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You squashed my favorite Beatle
OK, so I’m a couple of weeks late writing about the restored A Hard Day’s Night. C’mon people, the movie’s 50 years old, no matter when I wrote about it would be late, so gimme a break. But my...
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Classic Movies will Never Change but Everything New? Maybe.*
We are now just a tad under three years removed from the 40th anniversary of the release of Star Wars in 1977. In the thirty seven years since, it has spawned sequels, prequels, animated series,...
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Meet Toby Wing, the Darling of the Photographers
If I could go one day without hearing about the dreaded Kardashians, I would be thrilled. The most superficial of celebrities, they are famous for being famous, with no body of work to support their...
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Columbia Crime: The Whistler
The Whistler…was one of the most terrifying screenplays I’d ever read. A little after midnight, I called [Harry] Cohn at home. ‘It’s horrific, Mr. Cohn…. Exactly what I’ve been waiting for…it’ll scare...
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Cut to the Plot: The Cinematic Chase
It can be rather easily argued that the chase epitomizes the cinema. It is action as story. The dramatic conflict is easily defined between the chaser and the one being chased as simple pursuit....
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The Malaise of the Ghetto: LA HAINE (1995)
It’s about a society on its way down. And as it falls, it keeps telling itself: “So far so good… So far so good… So far so good.” It’s not how you fall that matters. It’s how you land. – LA HAINE...
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Show of hands!
The received wisdom is that the eyes are windows to the soul… but hands do the heavy lifting. My eyes tend to gravitate towards hands, both in real life and reel life. Hand shadows on the wall made...
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Pryor convictions
Richard Pryor stood on the stage of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC in 1998. It was an unusual audience for the veteran comedian—a bunch of stuffed shirt politicos and...
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BERGMAN IN JULY*
(* … or not. As an alert reader just pointed out, Bergman has been replaced with a tribute to James Garner. Still… I’ll leave this post for future reference, as I’m sure TCM will eventually bring some...
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Adventures of a Movie-Location Tourist in New Orleans
Ahhh, New Orleans! Where else can outrageous people eat exotic food while downing powerful alcoholic drinks with catastrophic names. On a recent trip to NOLA, I was prepared for everything—the crowds...
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Anime Goes West: Magic Boy (1959)
In the 1950s Hiroshi Okawa wanted to make Toei Company the Disney of Asia. Toei had already become a prolific producer of jidaigeki (period drama) movies, focusing on cheaply made programmers to...
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Building the Character, Literally
Movie locations are often as much a character in a movie as the ones the actors are playing. Location scouts and set designers work together to create physical spaces that work for the movie but also...
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A Century of Scares: Happy Birthday Bava!
This week marks the 100th birthday of Mario Bava who was born on July 30th (according to leading Bava researcher Tim Lucas and author of the essential Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark) or 31st...
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Applied genius: The Dick Smith Legacy
My early education in cinema involved the worship of a fair number of Hollywood makeup men: “Man of 1,000 Faces” Lon Chaney, Universal monster maker Jack P. Pierce, PLANET OF THE APES monkey mover...
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First things first, but not necessarily in that order
The Killing is many things. It’s a 1956 film noir heist film. It’s the earliest work that Stanley Kubrick embraced as representative of what he wanted to do. But The Thing You Need to Know About The...
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Monsters Again
Today is Walter Pidgeon’s day in this month long celebration of classic actors, the annual Summer Under the Stars here on TCM. One of the movies on the slate tonight is the 1956 classic Forbidden...
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On ‘David Fincher: Interviews’
I feel fortunate that in my life I have met an astounding number of smart, creative people who have become my colleagues and friends. From my fellow Movie Morlocks to book authors to fine artists, I am...
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Boyhoods: Richard Linklater and Karl Ove Knausgaard
“Time never goes as fast as in your childhood; an hour is never as short as it was then. Everything is open, you run here, you run there, do one thing, then...
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The Silver Screen Chameleons
Today is Paul Muni’s day here on TCM as we celebrate Summer Under the Stars and it immediately brings back a lot of memories. Way back when, Muni was the first actor of the thirties that I really...
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“Everything means something, I guess.” Remembering Marilyn Burns
Marilyn Burns gets top billing for THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974) and is the closest thing the movie has to a heroine but director Tobe Hooper seems for the film’s first forty to fifty minutes...
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