Blog Archives
Serious Clown
What happens when you add up every man who’s ever walked on the moon? You count more men than have ever been knighted to officially don the red wig and play the part of the clown, Ronald McDonald. In this surreal documentary, one former Ronald shows us just how hard it can be to escape [...]
Captain America’s Grunge Days
Can you believe it’s been 25 years since the Captain America film premiered? No, I’m not talking about the latest pair of franchise-within-a-franchise films in Marvel’s contemporary cinematic empire. I’m talking about a direct-to-video version of the Steve Rogers story that took liberties with the shield-slinger’s legend to deliver an environmental message back in the [...]
Prison. Drugs. Terror.
Getting started on the blog this week I was inspired by that Snowden trailer I just posted as well as an article I found while adding pages to my Flipboard magazine. Before Oliver Stone became one of the most important directors of his generation he was one of the most important screenwriters of his generation [...]
Stone On Snowden
I’m a huge Oliver Stone fan, and I’m anxious to see what he might do with his new biopic, Snowden, which tells the tale of the heroic whistleblower and is due out this coming Christmas. Knowing Stone I’m sure he’ll attempt to put the entire NSA surveillance program up on the screen just like he [...]
40 Years of Jaws
I’ve been posting about the 35th anniversary of The Shining over the last several weeks, but I thought it might be better to wait until it was officially summertime to post about the 40th anniversary of Jaws. The summer movie as we know it today didn’t exist until Jaws devoured box offices all summer long [...]
Overlook Twins
Continuing our celebration of 35 years of The Shining here’s another of Rob Ager’s insightful video examinations of the film. As I’ve mentioned, Ager is my favorite alternative critic of The Shining, and in this video he looks at the mystery and meaning of the ghostly twin girls in the Overlook Hotel. Stay Awake! Please [...]
Afghanistan and the West
“Increasingly, we live in a world where nothing makes any sense — events come and go like waves of a fever leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality. But, those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow. This is a film about why [...]
V Turns X
This year we celebrate the tenth birthday of the film V for Vendetta, based on the classic graphic novel by Alan Moore. Moore is more than cantankerous when addressing the cinematic adaptations of his work, and movies like Watchmen, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen explain his ill-temper. That said, for me, V [...]
The James Dean Story
Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre kicks off its massive Robert Altman retrospective this weekend. The series includes 19 features and 3 short films, but completists might notice that one of the director’s earliest projects didn’t make the cut. For me, the most important period in American culture is that window during the 1940′s and 1950′s when European [...]
