Archive for the 'Celluloid' Category
Forever My Girl
January 29th, 2008Long, long ago I can remember seeing a clip on Entertainment Tonight of a teenage Paula Abdul frolicking in some godforsaken low-budget musical set in a high school cafeteria. She looked dorky, the song was dorky, and the kitsch gods were smiling down on me. Eighteen-odd years later, I revisited it — and, yeah, it’s […]
365 Days of Unrepentant Couch Potatoishness
January 6th, 2008Time once again for list of films I saw in the previous year. I counted 131 movies seen in 2007, with only five of them theatrical — which is about average. Not on the page is the fact that I rated each film on a scale of one to five stars. The bulk of what […]
Disc-O Faves
December 17th, 2007Of all the year-end best-of lists that proliferate this time of year, DVD Savant’s Favored Disc Roundup is among the ones I look forward to the most. It gave me a lot of good ideas for stuff to add to the Netflix queue.
On trend especially I’ve noticed this year is that the prices for full […]
Bass-O-Matic
December 9th, 2007Images from Henri’s Walk to Paris, a rare children’s book designed by the legendary Saul Bass. Via Drawn of course. Because we like to indulge our loves of cats and über-cool movie credits in the same stroke, I also present the Bass-designed opening sequence from Walk on the Wild Side:
Bette in Bookstores
November 14th, 2007Although only the latest in a long string of similar bios, Ed Sikov’s Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis is an excellent book which manages to uncover new insights into the subject. Having considered Sikov’s 1998 bio on Billy Wilder one of the finest books on filmmaking ever, I devoured this one in galley […]
Guest Programmer Month at TCM
November 2nd, 2007This is kind of a nice month on Turner Classic Movies, since my beloved “best channel ever” is devoting every night of November to the guest programming of various well-known folk. It could have been a dud, I know, but luckily only three of the thirty celebrities fall into the “Who cares?” category (those would […]
Rhapsody in Nitrate
October 12th, 2007There’s a fascinating thread going on the Criterion discussion boards — apparently someone has tracked down what might be the only surviving copy of F.W. Murnau’s lost silent 4 Devils in Tacoma, Washington of all places. The ensuing discussion on intellectual property is an interesting read, not to mention the excited reactions from film lovers. […]
Name That Film on Flickr
October 11th, 2007Lately I’ve been delving into the Name That Film flickr group. It’s not just the fun of trying to guess the film stills captured off DVDs, but a lot of the images have a strange, surreal beauty (like the one above by frequent contributor Poletti). One can especially get a lot of interesting frames from […]
Revisiting Twice Upon a Time
September 14th, 2007Looks like our pal Ward Jenkins has done it again with a lengthy examination on the forgotten 1983 animated feature Twice Upon a Time in which he interviews animation expert and Twice superfan Taylor Jenssen. Like Ward, I first came across this movie long ago on VHS after reading something about it somewhere (Premiere magazine […]
Things to Watch While Sick
September 5th, 2007Yesterday I came down with a bout of sickness — runs, fever, headaches, icky feelings in my gut. I’m feeling much better now, but have you ever noticed that whenever you’re sick and stuck in front of the TV you’ll pretty much watch anything? Well, almost anything — old episodes of Sesame Street were too […]
Bald Guy vs. Fat Guy
August 3rd, 2007Very cool — digitized film reviews from Siskel & Ebert going back to 1987 are now viewable at atthemoviestv.com. Although it would be fun to revisit what they thought of the good movies, of course I had to immediately check out the worst ones. The first film I looked up, the 1996 crapfest Space Jam, […]
Mostly I Want to Play ‘Baby Bash’
July 29th, 2007As a special treat for Christopher’s birthday, the two of us caught an opening day screening of The Simpsons Movie. I was excited, and a bit leery. The Simpsons is a classic, one of the best shows on TV, but the creators have gone into autopilot over the last decade. I cherish the first 8 […]
Tuesday Bouillabaisse
July 24th, 2007A trio of things which had my gears spinning on a Tues.:
The A.V. Club’s Noel Murray ruminates on once-decent cable channels that went to pot in his Expatriated from TV Land weblog post. This is so, heartbreakingly true. If it wasn’t for my beloved TCM, I’d dump our entire DirecTV service. Read the post and […]
(Cough)
July 15th, 2007A couple of days ago, I was invited on a special “field trip” organized by Christopher’s workplace to go and see Michael Moore’s Sicko. Good film, even if it didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know — if you’re an ininsured, sick American, you’re screwed. HMOs and phamaceutical comglomerates are greedy bastards who thrive […]
What a Character
July 12th, 2007Veteran actor Charles Lane died recently at the age of 102. He survived the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and was a contract player at Warner Brothers in the early ’30s, among many accomplishments. What an amazing life he lived. I have to check out 42nd Street again to see his little bit as the […]
