Category: Watching

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 […]

Movie: The Court Jester (1955)

Pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone can be beneficial.  I have always said how much I hate musicals.  The more I thought about it, I realized I not only liked some movies with numerous musical sequences (i.e. the Marx Brothers’ Universal films) but I even liked some musical numbers, such as “On The Atchison, […]

Movie: *batteries not included (1987)

“Cute” used to be a word I used only in the pejorative. It would be very easy to dismiss this Spielberg-produced movie.  Of course it would be Spielberg (80’s Spielberg, no less) in that the elderly, eclectic and/or eccentric tenants are about to lose their ancient apartment building to an evil developer, only to have […]

Movie: Still Of The Night (1982)

In a perfect world, Roy Scheider would have been allowed to make exactly one movie in the 70s and 80s where he co-stars with a shark, and then he would have had to spend the rest of that era in thrillers set in New York City. There is something about Scheider that radiates urbane sophistication […]

Movie: The Dead Zone (1983)

It seems that every director with a distinctive, challenging style eventually reigns in their impulses and makes a more conventional feature for a major studio.  Not too long after David Lynch surprised everybody with The Elephant Man, David Cronenberg made the Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone.  How strange to think both directors also turned down the […]

Movie: Ordinary People (1980)

Prior to finally seeing this movie, the full extent of what I knew about it was this exchange in The Fisher King: Customer [looking in shock at cover of videotape]: “Ordinary Peepholes?” Clerk: “It’s a big-titty, spread-cheeky kind of thing” It turns out Ordinary People isn’t a big-titty, spread-cheeky kind of thing, but the Best […]

Movie: The Limey (1999)

“You’ve told me this story before” That line is spoken by the 20-something arm candy of Peter Fonda’s character.  “But I don’t mind if you tell it to me again.” This is a pretty apt summary of my feelings about The Limey, Steven Soderbergh’s 1999 movie that shows us a story we seen in many […]