In 2008, a 16mm print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was found in Buenos Aires that was significantly longer than any other version that currently exists. When the silent film debuted in Germany in 1927, it ran around two-and-a-half hours. As … Continue reading You could sleep along the way, dream in black and white
#8 — Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) It can be taken as an indicator of the faultiness of my prognostication skills that I thought Toy Story would never work. I’d seen a couple of the Pixar studio shorts previously, and, while … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Eight
Today is a day I have the pleasure of directing you elsewhere. Continue reading I’m walking a line—just barely enough to be living
76. Warren Zevon, Transverse City It was a major comeback for Warren Zevon when he released Sentimental Hygiene in 1987. His first album in five years, the release found Zevon addressing his own recent troubles, most notably with drug addiction. … Continue reading College Countdown: 90FM’s Top 90 of 1989, 76 and 75
Yeah, this is going to get into my dreams somehow tonight. Thanks, Comic Book Legends Revealed. Continue reading I find you in the morning after dreams of distant signs
At 90FM we used to have these stretches of programming that we called, admittedly without much ingenuity, Free Music Weeks. Making one of these happen started with us pulling something that was especially tricky for a little station like ours. We needed to convince a label to give us fifteen copies of a new release. That was our minimum for running a Free Music Week, the number of freebies we decided were needed to make it feel like the programming week was suitably inundated with one particular new album. Since our protocol at the time involved the DJ playing a … Continue reading One for Friday: Kingmaker, “Really Scrape the Sky”
Today I wish I was this guy: Continue reading Come and go with me, it’s more fun to share, we’ll both be completely at home in midair
Separate Lies (Julian Fellowes, 2005). Following his Oscar win for scripting Robert Altman’s exemplary Gosford Park, Julian Fellowes made his directorial debut with an adaptation of an an old novel by Nigel Balchin. The film focuses of a busy, distracted solicitor whose marriage begins to fray, a situation compounded when the death of a local man in a hit-and-run car accident brings secrets to light and sets everyone reeling into a series of moral compromises. The stuff of high drama is certainly present in abundance in the story, and with Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson and Rupert Everett at the head … Continue reading Almodóvar, Argott, Butterworth, Fellowes, Scorsese
Never Let Me Go is built upon some fairly commonplace themes. Unrequited love, the pains of growing up, the burden carried by the underclass all get an airing in the film. At times it feels very conventional, very plain. It … Continue reading Your footprints still they are in the sand, everything else washed away
#9 — The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) How long does a gag order on movie secrets last? Years before the term “spoiler alert” was coined and became part of the shared vernacular of moviegoing, Miramax was able to parlay the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 90s — Number Nine
