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My pantheon would include a trio of Carnegie Hall albums: Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck and MJQ.
The 42 Greatest Jazz Albums On The Floor By My Coffee Table
People in the U.S. are really into hating jazz. Remember when a bunch of us got really cranky about that Buzzfeed “What’s the deal with jazz?” thing? (Yeah, no, I’m not gonna link to it.) Then just a couple of weeks ago on the Twitter a high-profile profile writer recounted how Billy Bob Thorn...
Okay, GRISSOM GANG is utterly brilliant, one of Aldrich's most quintessential films. Try watching it again--but this time keep in mind that it's a COMEDY.
Blu-ray Consumer Guide, February 2019
To Peter Nellhaus, and to the memory of Nick Redman. Equipment: Playstation 3, Sony KD50X690E display, Pioneer Elite VSX-817 AV amplifier/receiver. (As it happens even the U.K. imports I looked at this time around were all-region, so the OPPO was not brought into play.) Age of Consent (Indicat...
"Giggly viciousness" is just a cooler way of saying "arrested development."
Incidentally, I'm not the first to point this out, but the real source for TH8 is "Fair Game," an episode of "The Rebel" that tells pretty much the same story in 1/7 the time, right down to the dame in handcuffs and the poisoned beverage. It's viewable on YouTube.
Notes on "The Hateful Eight"
For Jaime Grijalba 1 In the last scene of Bigger Than Life, the 1956 film directed by Nicholas Ray and produced by its star, James Mason, Ed Avery, the middle-class teacher played by Mason, is lying in a hospital bed after a psychotic episode brought on, ostensibly, by cortisone abuse. That ep...
Hey, better David Geffen than David Koch!
I Saw God And/Or "Avengers: Age Of Ultron" In IMAX 3D
Pretty girl! I decided it would be a real fun idea to get fucked up on drugs and go see Avengers: Age of Ultron in IMAX 3D at Sony Lincoln Square, or is it AMC Lincoln Square, and then write a sort of review of it as a pastiche of my one-time idol Lester Bangs' famous 1977 piece "I Saw God And...
"like rooting for the frog jumping on the back of the scorpion"
Just out of morbid curiosity, are you being weirdly ironic here or did you simply get this backwards?
Endings: Stanley Kubrick's The Killing
From my piece in the May issue of Sight & Sound, out on stands now, the ending of Stanley Kubrick's the Killing. Nicely edited for space (yes, I went over word count) my editor kindly allowed me to publish my longer essay here. Should we start with the final shot? Or the very near final s...
I find LALD a very good 007 film hobbled by two sizable problems: Moore's unbelievably wooden performance, and that godawful title song. Here you have a picture filled with some of the finest black actors of the day, and who do you get to do the song? Aretha? Lou Rawls? Tina Turner? At least Shirley Bassey? No! The whitest dude in rock 'n' roll! The very same guy Bond (in GOLDFINGER) said shouldn't be listened to without earmuffs. What a goddamn wasted opportunity!
Return of the Foo Foo Film Site
As one can't make a living running a semi-depressive, nostalgic, grieving blog, at least that I know of, I now direct you to some Professional Film Writing, not deliberately pitched to expend whatever good will I've accrued by being depressed and nostalgic but just...well, how's the saying go,...
Putting on my Pedant Hat, it's THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA (no THE); it's the name of the town.
I always liked MAJESTYK because it's quite funny, but perhaps you need to see it with an audience to realize that.
The Blu-Ray Consumer Guide That Wouldn't Die: Labor Day 2014 Edition
WHAT'S GOING ON HERE: Well, when I started writing for RogerEbert.com last year, around the time MSN Movies closed up shop, I thought maybe I could "monetize" this feature. I'd pitched it around to other revenue-generating sites before, and received...unenthusiastic responses, but my Ebert pals ...
Wasn't it Louis Armstrong who said of jazz, "If you gotta ask, you'll never know?"
Funny you should mention the Boswells; one of the just-wrapped new Biffle & Shooster shorts, SCHMO BOAT, features the Saguaro Sisters doing a pitch-perfect version of the Boswells' arrangement of "Roll On, Mississippi, Roll On."
Why Jazz Sucks, And Is Stupid, With Video Illustrations
1) Music Without Words Is Kind Of Inherently Lame, No? In 1967, after the death of his Orchestra's vital composer, arranger, and pianist Billy Strayhorn (who succumbed to cancer at the age of 51), grief-stricken bandleader Duke Ellington and his musicians recorded the tribute album ...and his mo...
Where can I get that T-shirt? :-D
Return of the crank
Over at RogerEbert.com, I muse, darkly, on the ostensible subject of "Art, Freedom, and the Bechdel Test." It's the sort of thing I would normally put up here, but as my editors there have told me that they're eager to let me fly my freak flag in their yard, I figured I'd take 'em up on it. Enjo...
Hey, "Rocky & Bullwinkle"'s pretty darn good, and it has both a terrific line from Whoopi Goldberg as a corrupt judge--"Don't you know celebrities are always above the law?"--and one of the best self-deprecating puns of all time: When asked if Bullwinkle can rappel [down a wall], the moose replies, "Why, sure! We've been repelling audiences for years!"
A few words about "Robert De Niro: Anatomy of an Actor"
On July 28, Phaidon will release two new books in its Cahiers du Cinema "Anatomy of an Actor" series, one of which is my own study of Robert De Niro. The other is Amy Nicholson's look at the work of Tom Cruise, an intriguing excerpt or offshoot of which appears here. I suppose a good number of ...
The problem is the perpetual misunderstanding of what a "cut" is. The "four-hour version" of WOLF is undoubtedly the first rough assembly, before they began editing it in earnest. (Marty's first assembly of NEW YORK, NEW YORK was over 5 1/2 hours, with the ballroom sequence alone running around 90 minutes.)
I've been recently enduring this myself with MAD MAD WORLD, with both Karen Kramer and Barrie Chase claiming the first "cut" ran five hours and that it was actually shown to audiences. The record shows it was first previewed at 210 minutes and tightened to its premiere length of 192 (both figures minus overture and such). It may have SEEMED like five hours to Chase (Karen wasn't even there at the time; she didn't meet Kramer until the following year), but it's still nonsense.
Gravy/Oscar post-mortem
So. Here's where the gravy whose making I chronicled on Friday ended up, mostly. Turned out pretty well all told. (I did not take the picture; an appreciative guest did.) What happened was, a couple of friends of My Lovely Wife and mine are talking about a move to the West Coast and Claire tho...
During my nearly 20 years at Sony, I tried like hell to get rep houses to take Quine seriously as an artist with a distinct style and oeuvre, especially given his mentorship of and influence on Blake Edwards. Alas, only the L.A. County Museum went for it. I still believe a major reappraisal of his work is in order.
Novak/Hitchcock/Truffaut/Quine
Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle, Richard Quine, 1957 In the still-vital book Hitchcock/Truffaut, made up mostly (and in the first edition, pretty much entirely) of interviews between the former critic and filmmaker François Truffaut and the director Alfred Hitchcock conducted in the summer o...
Glenn, thanks so much for the kind words. And yes, you are absolutely spot-on about what I call the "comfort food" vibe the movie has for us "slightly older" folks. There are places in the film, such as when Charles Lane pops up, or the scenes in the tower with Reiner, Ford, et al, where I almost feel like I'm inside the movie with these beloved folks (a la SHERLOCK, JR.), many of whom gave the best feature-film performances of their careers. And yes, it does make me yearn for that time in my childhood when we were truly a great nation that built things and were looked up to, and the concept of some maniac walking into a school and opening fire on children was simply beyond our comprehension. So yeah, we all wish we could go back to that era, but we can't, so we worship this talisman of a happier time as a respite from what we've become.
Plus it's a goddamn funny movie. So there!
Mike S.
Nostalgia for the rejected
From left: Jonathan Winters, Jimmy Durante, Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Mickey Rooney, and Buddy Hackett. Caesar is the most recent victim of the Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World curse; will Rooney be next? I suspect that even people who were very, very far from having been alive in 1963 reacted with som...
"Three hours of horrible people doing horrible things."
You mean like THE GODFATHER?
More "Wolf of Wall Street"
WARNING: This piece should only be read after you've seen The Wolf of Wall Street. Thanks. Writing about the Randy Newman album Born Again in 1978, the critic Robert Christgau registered a mild but pertinent complaint: "[R]ather than making you think about homophobes and heavy-metal toughs and m...
Oddly, seeing the film today, I thought it was a good picture, but it lacked the FUN I thought it should have. Corneau's version was properly serious, but where's that wicked sense of humor that almost a DePalma trademark?
Also, is it just me, or did this version seem a bit top-heavy with climaxes (the non-sexual kind), especially at the finale?
The current cinema, "Here Comes The Bleaugh" edition
There are some out there who will tell you that Riddick is good. Like the man said, I dare you to pay money to find out which of us is right. Also bad: Salinger. I wrote up Brian De Palma's Passion when I first saw it at the New York Film Festival in 2012, and again to commemorate its wider r...
LIFEFORCE: The original 116" version with Mancini's score or the 95" U.S. cut with some Mancini and new cues by Kamen?
Blu-ray Consumer Guide: Labor Day 2013 edition
Given how and when the last Blu-ray Consumer Guide came into being, it may be that scheduling these to appear at random national holidays may be the way to go. Equipment: Playstation 3 for domestic discs, OPPO BDP 83 for import discs, Panasonic Viera TCP50S30 plasma display, Pioneer Elite VSX-8...
A year or so ago, I was at UCLA to see the premiere of their restoration of an early Anthony Mann called STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT. You could hear the proverbial pin drop throughout the screening, especially during a horrific train wreck that comes out of nowhere. One month later, it played the Film Noir festival at the American Cinematheque. Unfortunately, there were three gorillas (sitting right behind me, of course) who found the train wreck (and subsequent scenes of bloody bodies being hauled out) the funniest goddamn thing they'd ever seen and howled with laughter. and as you know, laughter is contagious, and pretty soon everyone was laughing, and it continued right to the end of the film. I was furious, but there was nothing I could do about it. However, it does prove that it only takes one weasel to poison the well.
As for first-run movies, just do what I do: Wait a couple of weeks. The stupid kids will have moved on, and we grown-ups can enjoy the movie in darkened peace.
The myth of the consecrated movie theater
Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton, 1955 The digital guru and blogger Anil Dash has raised hackles in cinephile circles today with a lengthy and rhetorically free-wheeling (to say the least) post called "Sushers: Wrong about movies. Wrong about the world." In this post he expresses a good d...
Funny thing is, people who are going to RANGER seem to like it very much and are posting as such on the 'net. It will never recover from its dismal opening, but it may hang around longer than initially thought.
And yes, I loved it. So sue me.
Mizzou Tigers
Puga is just another of those twerps with zero skills who gets hired because she's cute and skinny; no actual ability or intelligence required. She's just lucky she's never interviewed Tommy Lee Jones.
As for Hill: he was, is and always will be a dick. That he has a career at all is cosmic retribution upon the world for some unknown sin.
I am Romina Puga
For the record, I am firmly with Jesse Eisenberg with respect this ridiculous dustup, and I don't think what he did to the fluffy little Romina Puga falls under the category of "berating" at all. I also think Puga's response to it was repellently opportunistic. My advice to any self-described en...
Well, Dennehy is a big star on Broadway, where he frequently gets leading roles. In a bizarre coincidence, I saw him a couple of years ago in the Wm. J. Bryan role in a revival of INHERIT THE WIND, while several years earlier, I saw a different revival in which Bryan was played by...Charles Durning!
Jack Klugman, 1922-2012
With Jack Lemmon in The Days of Wine And Roses, Blake Edwards, 1962. Sober cinephiles the world over will tell you that Klugman's character Jim is pretty much the platonic ideal of an AA sponsor. It is no insult to say that nobody did Jack Klugman better. An exemplary performer, and he sounded...
David, you suspect correctly. Per Mirren, Pat was against making the film and refused any cooperation.
Knife in the water
I don't feel like giving Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock more credibility it deserves by posting a still from it here, so instead what you've got here is Hitchcock himself, and Leigh herself, and maybe a set-dresser, making the actual Psycho. I suppose I'm pretty lucky that the movie, which is bad...
Okay, someone has to be the contrarian here, and I guess it's gonna be me. I enjoyed the picture thoroughly. Is it "baloney," as Norman Lloyd put it? Yeah, pretty much. But show me one biopic that isn't. Moreover, the main point of the story--the love/irritation relationship between Hitch and Alma--is fabulously done (it's no small irony that the movie's title bears only his name), and the filmmaking sections are far truer to the production experience than I've seen in far bigger pictures, even if they get some details wrong (e.g., nobody ever called Herrmann "Bernie"). And if nothing else, I thought Johansson--an actress I generally can't abide--did right by Leigh. Plus it has one of the funniest last lines in years (excluding a brief epilogue). Finally, it has Helen Fucking Mirren. So there ya go. My two cents.
Knife in the water
I don't feel like giving Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock more credibility it deserves by posting a still from it here, so instead what you've got here is Hitchcock himself, and Leigh herself, and maybe a set-dresser, making the actual Psycho. I suppose I'm pretty lucky that the movie, which is bad...
Mr. Hulse misremembers slightly. I wouldn't "wouldn't be caught dead" at a B-western; in fact, I had not been exposed to many of them, and indeed I owe him a great debt for furthering my understanding of and appreciation of the genre. He is no doubt referring to my less than great affection for singing cowboys, and the cracks I would make during screenings of some of the worst offenders. He has a tendency to take one specific remark and make it a blanket statement. He also can't understand my great affection for JOHNNY GUITAR. But that's okay. The man knows his shit, and deserves props for that.
The last of Louise
That's Louise Brooks up there, flanked by John Wayne and Ray "Crash" Corrigan, with goofball Max Terhune in front of her, in a publicity still for Overland Stage Raiders, her last film, made in 1938. What a way to go. Overland Stage Raiders was an entry in the "Three Mesquiteers" short featur...
A few years ago, Paramount kindly struck a new 35 of OSR--the first since 1953!--so we could shoe it at Cinecon. Not just because it's a darn good picture, but I felt that Brooks' presence might attract some folks who otherwise wouldn't be caught dead at a B-western. It played like gangbusters, with several people expressing surprise afterwards at how slick and well-made it was. The moral, of course, is that any road that gets you there is the right one.
The last of Louise
That's Louise Brooks up there, flanked by John Wayne and Ray "Crash" Corrigan, with goofball Max Terhune in front of her, in a publicity still for Overland Stage Raiders, her last film, made in 1938. What a way to go. Overland Stage Raiders was an entry in the "Three Mesquiteers" short featur...
You include recent one-shots like Zero and Starling, but leave out such vintage durables as Mr. Moto, Michael Shayne,Bulldog Drummond, The Lone Wolf, Boston Blackie, Bill Crane, The Saint/The Falcon and the Warren William incarnation of Perry Mason? Are you auditioning for a gig at "Entertainment Weekly?" :-O
Panic in Detroit
You may not believe this, but Tyler Perry is the least of the problems with Alex Cross. But the movie's existence did give me a chance to concoct a gallery of passable-to-great movie detectives. The Sessions presented this critic with a conundrum: it's a substantially laudable movie that does...
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