When we arrived for a screening of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, my partner in all things requested two tickets to “Angry Monkeys.” It took the ticket seller a beat or two to catch on, but once he … Continue reading I reached the top and had to stop and that’s what bothering me
#25 — An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951) As far as MGM was concerned, there was an element of risk to letting director Vincente Minnelli team up with Gene Kelly for the musical An American Paris. Though proven commodities, they’d … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Five
Snowpiercer, the new film from director Bong Joon-ho, is ravishingly bonkers. Based on a French comic book saga, the film presents a future vision of the world plunged into permanent, uninhabitable winter, a result of overcompensation in the battle against … Continue reading Everyone’s happy, they’re finally all the same, ’cause everyone’s jumping everyone else’s train
According to the gimmicky title scrawled across the top of my radio script (“Reel Thing V: The Final Frontier”), this review was featured in the fifth episode of our weekly movie review program. This was clearly a week in which our modest college town didn’t get very many new films, necessitating a trip to Madison to catch art film screenings there. I’d barely seen any Akira Kurosawa films by this point (probably only Ran, and I may not have even seen that yet), a highly inconvenient fact I tried to cover up in the writing process with only the most … Continue reading From the Archive: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams
#26 — A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951) Elaine Stritch was talking about Marlon Brando once, and Elaine Stritch never minced words. In discussing Brando’s time in class with Stella Adler, studying the fiercely emergent acting strategy formulated by Constantin … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Six
This is the kind of good kid I was in preparation for the review below. Knowing that we’d be covering Other People’s Money on our radio program, The Reel Thing, I went to one of the upper floors of the UW-SP library and checked out a copy of Jerry Sterner’s play to read in advance of seeing the film. Part of the reason, then, this is a slightly longer review than the norm for our weekly show is I had all this deep background knowledge to share. The nineteen-eighties will be forever typified as the time when greed came to … Continue reading From the Archive: Other People’s Money
#27 — Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953) Well before “spoiler” became a word that loomed almost larger than any other for moviegoers, Diabolique was a film that urged viewers to keep its secrets hidden from those who hadn’t yet bought a … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Seven
Though the release model was already suffering from the continuing explosion of the home video market, Disney was still slipping into their vaults for regular theatrical release of their animated classics. Not 3D version or even prints that were given anything but the most cursory clean-up, but instead they’d just drag one of the old favorites out confident that youthful moviegoers hadn’t had a chance to see it previously. One Hundred and One Dalmatians took its turn in the summer of 1991. As the mostly dutifully transcriptions below indicates, I had the official formatting of the title wrong. I’ve cleaned … Continue reading From the Archive: One Hundred and One Dalmatians
#28 — From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953) Any film from the first part of the nineteen-fifties is going to seem tame when measured against the norms at play some sixty years later, so its advisable to remember that the beach make-out scene in From Here to Eternity became iconic, at least in part, due to its raciness. The various censorious powers-that-been offered a fleet of suggestions as to how to make the moment palatable, from having the two lip-locked lovers demurely stand up to slapping a nice, thick bathrobe across Burt Lancaster’s bank vault torso. There was also … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Twenty-Eight
Darling Companion (Lawrence Kasdan, 2012). I’ve got loads of residual affection for writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, but he sure doesn’t make it easy to be one of his defenders these days. Darling Companion was his first film in nearly decade, following the appallingly bad Stephen King adaptation Dreamcatcher. It doesn’t make an argument that he used his creative downtime wisely. As wispy of a film concept as anyone’s likely to come across, Kasdan’s story (co-written with his wife, Meg Kasdan) concerns an older couple who adopt a stray dog and then lose that new furry family member in the woods around … Continue reading Faxon and Rash, Kasdan, Lloyd, Lord and Miller, Snyder
Coffee for Two 