The Sundance film festival recently pulled up stakes from where it was hosted in Park City, Utah, for over four decades.  Odd how a small town so strongly associated with cinema has had so few films made there.  The only one that comes to my mind is 1981 independently-produced horror flick The Boogens, which has […]

Early 2025 found the US federal government targeting universities for their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, threatening more than 50 of those institutions with the withholding of federal funds if they did not comply.  Only a handful of these refused to cave to this demand, the most high-profile being Harvard.  More recently, the president tried […]

There’s a quote by Sarah Dessen I like, about how home is not a place but a moment.  I love 1982’s Tron and, when I watch it, it is like I reconnect with part of me from when I saw it in its original theatrical run.  Then there was 2010s Tron: Legacy, for which I […]

I never expected to see Ginger Rogers so enamored with pot, yet 1954’s Beautiful Stranger has her spending a great deal of time throwing clay pots, firing them in a kiln and glazing them.  Wait, what did you think I was talking about? I always like scenes in movies where characters discover joy in some […]

I wouldn’t think there would be rare egg collectors, yet some of the things I collect have made me realize there are collectors for absolutely anything.  Not sure which would surprise me more, the weirdest things anybody has ever collected or the most bizarre sexual kinks which have ever existed. In 1984’s A Breed Apart, […]

October is my favorite time of year.  1982’s Something Wicked This Way Comes is set in a small American town in the 1910’s over the course of three days late in that month, and it captures a certain October-ness.  This, in a movie without much imaginary associated with the month, bar one shot of a […]

Just looking at the title of 1967’s Luv should give potential viewers an idea of bitter satire to be found within.  It had me thinking of the intros to both The Shangri-La’s “Give Him a Great Big Kiss” and The New York Dolls’s “Lookin’ for a Kiss” which explicitly spell it that way.  Given how […]

There are some dogs in Hitchcock’s filmography, with some of the more notable missteps being the dry stretch from Marnie to Topaz.  His feature after that period (and second-to-last overall) was Frenzy, a movie critically lauded for being an alleged return to form, but which I found to be simply a deeply unpleasant experience. 1957’s […]

Many of the memories of summers from my childhood are of playing the board game Clue with my grandmother at the picnic table on the back patio of her house.  The set was the 1963 edition, with a mid-century modern design which influenced my tastes more than I would think possible.  Thinking back, I can […]

Only in noir would a pet store be open as late as the one in 1953 noir 99 River Street.  I couldn’t help but recall the Simpsons episode about prohibition, where Moe’s continues operating as a bar under the ruse it is now a pet shop.  When the law raids it, the agent leading the […]

I remember being infatuated with 1984’s Cloak & Dagger on its original release, but I am surprised I was enough of the fan that I had the board game.  The board was a simplified map of the world with only a few available cities.  One of those was Reykjavik, and this was the first time […]

I tend to think of the atomic scare as being something long in the past and confined roughly to two eras of the 20th century, the 50’s and the 80’s.  Go figure, it is 2025 and, as I write this, there is uncertainty as to whether the US and Israel have taken out Iran’s capability […]

As the kind of person who greatly values their privacy, I never enjoy being somebody’s houseguest.  I can’t begin to imagine how I would handle having a houseguest, something I have had the good fortune to avoid thus far.  I worry I would be like John Hurt in 1978’s The Shout and have Alan Bates […]

Paul Douglas seems to play frustrated guys.  I last saw him getting cuckolded by wife Barbara Stanwyck in 1952’s Clash by Night.  Two years later, he is an easily agitated businessman in The Maggie (a.k.a. High and Dry).  The man has much to get worked up about.  He is only trying to get his company’s […]