Category: Watching

My wife and I had the good fortune to eat at a restaurant awarded with five Mobil stars for several consecutive years.  It is closed now, but we had scrimped and saved enough to dine there three times.  To their credit, everybody at the establishment were courteous, and we were in turn.  I’m sure they […]

1955’s Creature with the Atom Brain is a curiosity.  I thought I was just getting a typical 1950’s sci-fi b-movie.  Instead, I got a weird mix of horror, sci-fi and noir.  It especially feels like the last of those, as much of its focus is on police detectives investigating crimes committed by a gang leader […]

I have seen many movies where the actors appear to be having a miserable time and so I had trouble connecting with the feature.  2001’s heist comedy Bandits has the exact opposite problem: the actors appear to be having a great time, to the extent it is like watching a party to which the audience […]

Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing allegedly star in 1970’s Scream and Scream Again.  If one watched the movie without seeing the opening credits, I don’t think many would suspect those three were top-billed. But then, if anybody misses the opening credit sequence, they wouldn’t see footage of man jogging.  A lot of footage.  […]

In the eighties, the Rubik Cube was so ubiquitous that all sorts of similar toys had to be developed to satisfy the market demand.  Some were pyramid shaped, some had five sides or more. One was even spherical.  But one that stands out in my mind is something everybody called a “snake”, though I’m not […]

1948’s An Act of Murder has a kernel of an interesting idea.  What happens when a hanging judge decides he can’t let his wife suffer any longer from an inoperable brain tumor?  Fredric March plays the judge, dubbed Old Man Maximum for his tendency to dole out maximum sentences.  He also disregards any and all […]

I am not a fan of jukebox musicals.  You know, those films like Mama Mia or Across the Universe, where a plot is constructed around songs by a single artist of a certain genre but which are otherwise unrelated.  1985’s The Adventures of Mark Twain is not such a film (it doesn’t have any musical […]

Another Kino three-disc noir box set, another movie named after an exotic locale.  Going into this, I had no doubt this would be another Casablanca wannabe, like Singapore or Tangier, each of which led off other sets in the series.  To my considerable surprise, 1946’s Calcutta does not follow that formula.  Instead, this is a […]

I like how some of the graduates of the Corman film school, when they went on to better things, took some of that producer’s stock actors with them.  Like a good luck charm, Joe Dante always has a place, however small, for Dick Miller in his pictures.  Similarly, I can’t recall a Jonathan Demme feature […]

One my favorite of the millions of throwaway gags in the early years of The Simpsons is a movie marquee showing one of the titles playing is SING MONKEY SING!!!  I like to ponder what that film would have been like, if it had been real.  That title came to mind when I first heard […]

It is often difficult for audiences who came of age after a period to be able to properly appreciate a work in its historical context.  The sci-fi movie genre was in a sad state in the period between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars (don’t even think of correcting me by saying its name […]

In 1974, Steven Spielberg graduated from TV work to direct his first theatrical film, Sugarland Express.  I’ll admit I didn’t know much about it prior to my first time seeing it recently. It opens with a disclaimer saying what we are to see if based on real events that happened in Texas in 1969.  I […]

Film noir tends to be populated with characters who are dirt poor.  1950’s Try and Get Me stays truer to those characters than most films of the era—Frank Lovejoy and his family actually have a dirt yard around their crappy house. This movie was originally released as The Sound of Fury, and those who are […]

I keep making this stupid wisecrack about trying to seek diplomatic immunity at an International House of Pancakes.  But the characters in 1976’s weird grindhouse heist picture Blind Rage spend so much time in one that I suspect they really think this is some sort of neutral territory akin to international waters. A climatic fight […]

I neither liked nor disliked Matthew McConaughey prior to seeing the first season of True Detective.  Like seemingly 95% of the population, I definitely started paying attention to him starting with that series.  His Rust Cohle was a deeply intriguing character with hints of darkness near the surface of a calm, controlled exterior. His murderer-for-hire […]