A lot of people are involved in the production of any movie and, in a movie like Star Wars, there’s an unusually great number of people who were extras, or played minor characters and were unrecognizable under helmets or in latex masks. Elstree 1976 is a documentary about some of those actors, people of various […]
Category: Watching
Movie: The Rite (2011)
Second to torture porn, exorcism movies may the worst type of horror film. Every one of them adheres, to varying degrees, to a boilerplate. Unavoidably, they always have the big exorcism as the final third. And yet, I must find this genre a guilty pleasure because it seems I have seen every one of the […]
Movie: Spaced Invaders (1990)
I’m not sure if Spielberg’s influence on 80’s films (whether directing or producing) was such a good thing. Although he didn’t directly have a hand in 1990’s Spaced Invaders, this is a low-rent riff on many of his recurring themes, notably aliens, suburbs and kids. There’s even a cute little robot that is befriended by […]
Movie: The Thin Man (1934)
The comedian Andy Kaufman refused to play somebody who was drunk or stoned, dismissing it is cheap way to get laughs. The Thin Man is a critically-revered film that I feel validates that belief. I was shocked I could feel anything less than love for a movie with this pedigree. The top-billed stars are William […]
Movie: Shazam! (2019)
My wife and I have a strong affinity with a small town in southern West Virginia named Hinton. The town has a vintage, single-screen movie theater which we always wanted to see a movie in, except it was never showing anything we wanted to see when we were visiting the town. Although we are not […]
Movie: Paper Moon (1973)
This movie should have been crap. Overwrought, sentimental, melodramatic crap. In the depression-era great plains, a con man and a nine-year-old girl he claims isn’t his daughter (but most certainly is) squabble and do various cons in an effort to get her to the girl’s only remaining known (emphasis on known) family in St. Joseph, […]
Movie: Train To Busan (2016) / Peninsula (2020)
I was so done with zombies. In the 90s, I found myself a little ahead of the curve when I decided to see Dawn Of The Dead, after reading intriguing stories about the production in journalist Chet Flipo’s Everybody Was Kung-Fu Dancing. Pretty soon, I was renting all kinds of tapes on the horror shelves […]
Movie: How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying (1967)
Did you wistfully watch Mad Men, secretly longing for the days of long rows of desks on floor after floor of entirely glass-fronted skyscrapers in New York City? Does old advertising for, and items related to, Pan Am airlines have you despairing over the current state of air travel, which is basically a bus with […]
Movie: No Highway In The Sky (1951)
I’m trying to write this essay while still reeling from this movie. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it feels like I walked away from a plane crash but, well, I’m not sure what to say right now. I went into this with zero expectations. I didn’t even know what is was about. […]
Movie: 48 Hrs. (1982)
Isn’t it strange how there can be some wildly popular movies it just happens you have never seen? Movies you weren’t actively trying to avoid, but they somehow always remained on the periphery of potential films to watch. For me, one of those movies was 1982’s 48 Hrs. I was in elementary school when this […]
Movie: God Told Me To (1976)
I find it odd that I have repeatedly encountered dismissive assessments of Larry Cohen’s film oeuvre, usually claiming his work is too inconsistent to be ranked along the likes of Romero and Carpenter. I disagree with this as, the more of his work I see, I have found most of his films in a similar […]
Movie: Nocturnal Animals (2016)
As I have written before, I own a lot of physical media. Regularly hitting certain deals usually results in me acquiring movies for a pittance movies of which I am previously unaware. I like to go into a movie educated yet knowing as little as I can about the plot, so I’ll check out the […]
Movie: The Sleeping City (1950)
Coleen Gray has a great little speech in this movie. She’s a nurse and she and a doctor (played by Richard Conte) are taking a smoke break on a balcony. Gray’s speech is a surprisingly grim assessment of humanity. Curiously, the actual image in this scene is greyer than anything in any other movie I […]
Movie: 976-EVIL (1988)
Some of the movies I watch I only learned about from books, which is partly why I read so many movie books. That, and I have no life. I was turned on to Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead in the early 90’s because of a piece I read in Chet Flippo’s book Everybody Was Kung-Fu […]
Movie: Abandoned (1949)
I love film noir, a genre that only became a genre after the fact. Before French critics coined the term, noir was simply “crime” pictures, usually the lower-budget second feature on a double-bill (or the “B-movie”). So, while I may prefer to watch a movie of this type before randomly choosing one from most other […]