I have only vacationed in Canada once, taking a brief road trip to Toronto by way of Windsor.  We had apparently picked the wrong time to do this, as the country’s relations with the US was at a low, as result of a trade dispute.  Having always heard how polite Canucks are, I was stunned […]

On her last day in a recording studio, Janis Joplin did an acapella number asking the Lord to buy her a Mercedes Benz.  She didn’t specify whether the car should be bulletproof, as to better protect George Clooney and Nicole Kidman in 1997’s The Peacemaker while they seem to destroy half of Vienna while trying […]

Short answer: yes. I suspect the general impression most people have of the 1950’s America is it was hopelessly naïve.  Although I wasn’t there to experience it myself, I know there had to be a lot more going on with most people than obsessively looking out for an imagined communist menace while cruising in a […]

William Goldman was quite the prolific screenwriter.  Most famously known for The Princess Bride, he actually worked across a wide range of genres, authoring such screenplays as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man and Misery.  So I was intrigued when I noticed he wrote a novel that was adapted into 1968’s No Way […]

When this 1997 anime appeared on Shudder, I did a double-take.  This movie has appeared on my radar occasionally for many years now, but I wasn’t curious enough to learn more about it.  I realize this is a bias, but Akira is the only anime I have enjoyed.  Yet I found myself intrigued when a […]

1980’s Melvin and Howard is based on a true story.  There are a couple of things I need to make clear from the beginning.  First, there needs to be some clarification that it is based on a true story and not based on hard facts.  Second, I am going to delve a bit into the […]

There have been bad movies based on concept albums.  Then there have been bad “jukebox musical” films, where a narrative thread tries to serve as a throughline for otherwise unrelated songs.  But here is a true oddity: It Couldn’t Happen Here takes the tracks from the Pet Shop Boys album Actually and…uh, well, I’m not […]

Nothing happens in the 1963 Italian gothic horror film The Blancheville Monster.  What is confusing is how much nothing happens in it.  There is a weird inertia to this picture, even if it has a girl returning to her family castle after living in exile, her father who may or may not be deceased (and, […]

At one point in 2011’s Late Bloomers, one of William Hurt’s sons tell him about the difference between cognitive age and physical age.  Apparently, the difference between the two is most people think of themselves, on average, as eight years younger than their physical age.  As somebody on the downward slope past the middle of […]

I am currently fighting a battle against some sort of ivy I planted in a flower bed a long time ago.  It started out as green and creamy white and didn’t grow tall enough to lift off the ground.  But it eventually evolved into pure green shoots that grew too tall to support themselves.  They […]

In 1974’s Ransom (released in the US as The Terrorists), Sean Connery takes on a group of terrorists who have hijacked an airliner and have a British diplomat held hostage.  One would expect the former James Bond and future star of Highlander, The Hunt for Red October and The Rock to open a big ol’ […]

Not too long ago, I finally saw The Public Enemy, Jimmy Cagney’s most famous gangster role.  Now I finally caught up with what is essentially the equivalent of that for Edward G. Robinson, 1931’s Little Ceasar.  I know it isn’t fair to compare those films, but I preferred the Cagney picture over this one. The […]

In movies, people are always taking sanctuary in churches, monasteries and convents, but I do not recall ever hearing about somebody doing this in real life.  This is what residents of a flooded town do in 1951’s Thunder on the Hill, taking shelter in a hilltop convent.  As for me, I wasn’t taken in when […]

Is it possible to be a thief and yet deeply care about the people steal from?  For me, that enigma is the heart of 2019’s Bad Education, a dramatization of the largest embezzlement from a public school system to date.  Note the addition of “to date”, as we’ll probably have an even bigger one at […]

Hell hath no fury like a 50-foot-tall woman scorned.  At least, that’s what 1958’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman would have us believe.  Allison Hayes plays the titular character.  Before her transformation, she was in a bad way.  For reasons unclear to me, she still loves her scheming, greedy, adulterous husband (William Hudson).  He […]