Stars and stuff on the silver screen.
Your Yahoo! News, your YouTube, your Atlas Shrugs, they come and go. Some web site comment sections go to college to get more knowledge, and some go to Jupiter to get more stupider. But one comment section reigns supreme. One comments section has come out on top, year after year, …
Having been out of print for four decades did a lot to raise the status of Decoy in a lot of peoples’ minds. In truth, it’s a second-tier film noir; stylistically, it doesn’t do much for the medium, and it suffers from some lackluster performances and a lot of scenes …
Because I guess we’ve exhausted all of our other entertainment options, somebody has gone ahead and made a movie of Atlas Shrugged. The troubled production has finally arrived in cineplexes, and while it’s not the big-budget blockbuster Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie extravaganza we were once promised, I’m sure it’s a wonderful …
LITTLE-SEEN FILM CREDITS The producers would like to thank the Film Commission of Pocatello, Idaho Six animals were injured in the making of this film Promotional services provided by the Lucchese Organized Crime Syndicate Jack Valenti can eat a big fat dick Un film de Donny Most EMERGING CINEMATIC SCHOOLS …
Most recent developments in pornography have left me feeling distinctly like a grouchy old coot who wants the darn kids to stop xxxtreme-fucking on his lawn. Bukkake, dick-spitting, and the overall trend of casting people who don’t seem to even like each other, let alone want to have sex with …
Key Largo, as can be sniffed out from its somewhat stagey, cramped qualities, had its origins as a stage play. It bears little resemblance to the original product — a bit of a surprise since Maxwell Anderson was, at the time, an extremely popular playwright and a go-to source for …
This joke has been cribbed about a million times recently, but I originally wrote it — with some assists from Angie Epley (center square) and Whitney Pastorek (B-6) — in 2007, so I’m claiming credit for the original idea. Plus, mine is funnier. Prove me wrong, internet. It’s time once …
It’s probably unfair to say that the public had fallen out of love with Bogart and Bacall by the time 1947’s Dark Passage rolled around. (They certainly hadn’t fallen out of love with one another, despite the 25-year difference in their ages.) But they’d gone from The Big Sleep, one …
I have never been particularly fond of Tennessee Williams. Part of this may be because I’m not his intended audience, but with very few exceptions (I enjoy A Streetcar Named Desire), I find his stuff a little, well, airy for my taste. Reading his plays and novels, and comparing them …
(In ‘honor’ of the upcoming and sure-to-be-hilarious big-screen adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, I present some ballast from the past in the form of this Rand-Chandler mash-up. Enjoy.) Mrs. Roark’s house was outsized and showy, like you’d figure an architect’s house would be. It wasn’t even a house, really; it was …
Joseph H. Lewis’ reputation was built on his ability to create surprisingly artful films out of extremely base material, transforming ultra-low budgets and relatively unknown casts into movies that, if they weren’t cinematic classics, were at least far better than they had any right to be. Responsible for two of …
“I never met anybody,” Richard Pryor once pointed out, “who said when they were a kid: I wanna grow up and be a critic.” Did he ever meet anyone who said ‘I wanna grow up and watch movies and listen to music and read books all day’? That will remain …
It’s pretty presumptuous — not to mention trite — for a critic to talk about the movie a filmmaker should have made instead of the one they made. But it’s also a suggestion that’s inescapable after watching a movie like The King’s Speech. Here you have a concatenation of massive …
First of all, how about that title, eh? The movie could be a heap of shit and it would still win points for the title, which sounds like some lost French new wave picture. Éclat de Silence, avec Alain Delon. But no, it’s an American film noir, albeit a pretty …
Judging a movie by its potential is probably skirting the edge of fairness, but the creepy 1947 carnival-noir Nightmare Alley tempts pretty strongly in that direction. The feeling it finally leaves you with is an unsatisfying one, both in the way it frequently opens up possibilities it doesn’t quite live …
