Three films deep into Daniel Craig’s tenure as James Bond, and the reboot of the character that started with 2006’s Casino Royale is totally complete. In Skyfall there are hints of the character as he was previously conceived–in the brief … Continue reading Buy the sky and sell the sky and bleed the sky and tell the sky
#9 — The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) There’s a beautiful desolation at the heart of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, a echoing ache that’s given physical form by the scorched, dusty streets of the dying nineteen-fifties Texas town … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Nine
It has been twelve long years since Robert Zemeckis directed a film that had real live actors in it. He would undoubtedly take umbrage with that characterization, noting that the stop-motion animation efforts he’s toiled on during those dozen years … Continue reading Turn this crazy bird around, I shouldn’t have got on this flight tonight
Since I was gone for a week, I intentionally withdrew from selecting new items to review for Spectrum Culture, and my editor was kind enough to refrain from assigning due date for the one or two things I had that were, frankly, a little overdue. I’ll pay for that mercy a bit in the week ahead as I’ve got a lot of writing to do. For this past week, however, the only thing I had go up on the site was my contribution to the next installment in our year-by-year survey of great comedic performances. I’m especially glad the filmography … Continue reading Spectrum Check
#10 — Network (Sidney Lumet, 1976) I don’t think it’s quite right to say that all great films are timeless. I do think there are broadly translatable qualities to the very best works–things such as wit, grace, intellectual heft and … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Ten
I nearly forgot that I have a Halloween tradition. For the third year in a row, these are things that I find (or at least have found) scary… Ridley Scott’s Alien was released in theaters six days before me ninth … Continue reading Two steps forward, don’t say I didn’t warn you
Harry and Walter Go to New York (Mark Rydell, 1976). A colleague of mine at Spectrum Culture wrote about this nostalgic caper comedy a while back, calling it “a delightful farce of a film.” Not really, but it’s surely an oddball relic of the era when nineteen-seventies adventurism gave way to self-defeating excess. Clearly inspired by (and given its greenlight due to) the smashing success of George Roy Hill’s The Sting a few years earlier, the film casts Elliott Gould and James Caan as a pair of hackneyed vaudevillians in the late nineteenth century who get caught up in a … Continue reading Kubrick, Kurosawa, Robbins and Wise, Rydell, Wilder
Since I’ve been traveling the past week, I didn’t contribute much to Spectrum Culture, so I’ll actually reach back a couple weeks to note my contributions to pair of features that I had a hand in creating in the first place. There is an occasional “Playlist” feature at the site, which finds the staff combing through the entire discography of an artist to come to some level of consensus about the best track from each release. For the most recent edition, my suggestion as to who to cover won the day and we examined the collected work of The Cure. … Continue reading Spectrum Check
I had plenty of stuff up at Spectrum Culture this week, with probably the most notable being my review of the film that earned Best Director honors at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. It’s probably among the best of the year, and the performance of lead actress Emayatzy Corinealdi is definitely among the year’s best. I also adhered to my previously established role as the person on staff who reviews offshoots of Sleater-Kinney. In this instance, it’s the second effort from the band that bears Corin Tucker’s name. It’s solid enough, but it doesn’t manage to recall the style of … Continue reading Spectrum Check
#11 — A Woman Under the Influence (John Cassavetes, 1974) It’s monstrously difficulty to detail the strengths of the cinematic signature pieces of John Cassavetes. The revolutionary filmmaker’s defining strengths are well-established: a bruising verisimilitude, a compulsion to push his … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 70s — Number Eleven
