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Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Godzilla Is Inside All of Us

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It seems absurd at this late date to be rediscovering the depth of metaphor in Ishiro Honda's Godzilla . Godzilla has been an icon of ...
1 comment:
Saturday, December 30, 2023

The Grant Mystique: Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

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Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, directed by Frank Capra) is probably the most divisive film in Cary Grant's filmography. It is perenniall...
2 comments:
Saturday, November 25, 2023

A Remarkable Collection of Dopes

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It's a shame that they're killers, because cigarettes used to be the most valuable prop in movies. There are whole films from the ...
Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Ants in the Pants

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"I got ants in my pants and I need to dance!" -- James Brown It's been a while since I've seen Them! (1954, directe...
Sunday, November 12, 2023

You Reap What You Sow

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Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity. The less they deserve, the...
Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Flesh of My Flesh

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My first impression of Suitable Flesh (2023, directed by Joe Lynch) during its first act was that it didn't feel like a horror movie ...
1 comment:
Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Bats in the Belfry

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The Vampire Bat (1933, directed by Frank R. Strayer) is filmmaking opportunism at its finest. Its studio, Majestic Pictures, had a reputa...
Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Scare-a-Thon 2023: We Have Always Lived In the Castle

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Here's another edition of my friend, Aaron's, Scare-a-thon. I'm on the panel here. It's for a good cause. There are a co...
Friday, October 13, 2023

A Murderer's Dozen

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"Stiff." That's the word for most films from the dawn of talkies. "Stilted" is a good one, too. The Thirteenth Cha...
Sunday, October 08, 2023

The Blood is the Life

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Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) is a pivotal movie in the history of horror movies. It is the first major horror film of the sound era....
Thursday, October 05, 2023

Scare-a-Thon with DR. AC: Crimes of the Future

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Here's another roundtable discussion with my friend and former erstwhile editor, Dr. AC about one of my favorite filmmakers. I need to t...
Wednesday, October 04, 2023

X Marks the Spot

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According to one of my old spiral-bound movie notebooks, I saw Doctor X (1932, directed by Michael Curtiz) some time during my time as a ...
Tuesday, October 03, 2023

Behind Castle Walls

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My partner and I were speculating in the course of a long drive last week about favorite authors we would like to have met. We've met ...
Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Keep Watching the Sky!

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I was eight years old the first time I saw The Thing from Another World (1951, directed by Christian Nyby). It played in the middle of a ...
Friday, September 01, 2023

The Grant Mystique: Operation Petticoat (1959)

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If you were to name Cary Grant's most influential movies, you might name films like North by Northwest, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Fri...
Sunday, August 20, 2023

Strange Cargo

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I commented on social media last week that I thought you could stage The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023, directed by André Øvredal) as ...
1 comment:
Sunday, August 06, 2023

Hand in Hand

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There's a deep mythological undercurrent in Talk to Me (2022, directed by Danny Philippou and Michael Philippou). When I described th...
2 comments:
Sunday, July 23, 2023

A Sympathy of Choices

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“If there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it, Making it momentary as a sound, Swift as a shadow, shor...
Wednesday, July 19, 2023

The Grant Mystique: Charade (1963)

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Cary Grant made three films with director Stanley Donen between 1958 and 1963. Those three films arguably define the sunset of his acting ...
Saturday, July 08, 2023

The Quatermass Legacy

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I sat in on this vodcast (is that even a word?) celebrating the 70th anniversary of the original broadcast of The Quatermass Experiment . ...
1 comment:
Tuesday, July 04, 2023

Victory Through Air Power

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Air Force (1943, directed by Howard Hawks) is absolutely propaganda. Let's make that crystal clear at the outset. Almost all war film...
Monday, June 26, 2023

The Prodigal Daughter

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One of the first questions I asked myself about Monica (2022, directed by Andrea Pallaoro) as the projectionist closed the curtains to na...
Sunday, June 18, 2023

The Grant Mystique: To Catch A Thief (1955)

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Of the films Cary Grant made with Alfred Hitchcock, To Catch A Thief (1955) is the one that has been dismissed most often by the director...
Wednesday, June 07, 2023

Art School Blues

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Kelly Reichardt's new film, Showing Up (2022), strikes me as a film with a verrrrry specific audience, and unless you're either a...
Tuesday, May 09, 2023

Eat the Rich

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The billionaire class really ought to pay closer attention to what's bubbling through the collective unconscious of the current era. T...
1 comment:
Sunday, April 30, 2023

Matchstick Women

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Hollywood history is filled with bad takes. The most famous is probably the assessment of Fred Astaire after his first screen test at RKO:...
Friday, March 31, 2023

Favorite Stars in B Movies Blogathon: The Narrow Margin (1952)

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The Narrow Margin (1952, directed by Richard Fleischer) was completed in 1950, but wasn't released by RKO Pictures for another two ye...
9 comments:
Sunday, March 12, 2023

True/False 2023: Fathers and Mothers

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Red Herring (2023, directed by Kit Vincent) starts with an image of a man swimming at twilight. This man is the director's father, ...
Monday, March 06, 2023

True/False 2023: Knocked Up

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How To Have an American Baby (2023, directed by Leslie Tai) takes a long look at the practice of Chinese tourism to the United States in ...
Saturday, March 04, 2023

True/False 2023: Masculine and Feminine

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Here's another dispatch from True/False. The festival's programmers don't set out to rhyme the films on the schedule with one ...