Film
My Favorite Movies 20 – A Day in the Country (Partie de Campagne) (Jean Renoir, 1936)
“Young people prancing around in the country” is right up there with “left handed forms of human endeavor” on my list of all time favorite movie subject matters. You name it, I heart it: People on Sunday, Smiles of a Summer’s Night, I even like Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy far more than I…
Read MoreMonthly Movie Reviews – July, 2011
Here are some two sentence reviews of the movies I watched in July. Stats Movies watched – 28 Movies that were new to me – 22 Anna Farris movies – 3 Monthly Masterpieces – Foolish Wives, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday July 31 Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004) – Pretty hilarious look at Metallica hiring a therapist so the…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 19 – Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1922)
“Take a close look at the world, keep on doing so, and in the end it will lay bare for you all its cruelty and its ugliness.” This was how French film critic Andre Bazin described the work of one of the greatest American film directors of the silent era. And while Bazin perhaps overplayed…
Read MoreMonthly Movie Reviews – June, 2011
Here are some two sentence reviews of the movies I watched in June. Stats Movies watched – 16 Movies that were new to me – 15 Seasons of television shows watched – 13: Terriers, Game of Thrones, 2 seasons Bored to Death, 2 seasons Justified, 3 seasons True Blood, 4 seasons Mad Men Monthly Masterpieces – The Maltese…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 18 – The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
The Maltese Falcon was hardly the first private eye film (indeed, the Dashiell Hammett story it was based on had been filmed twice before the 1941 version I am discussing today). However, due to its superlative quality and undeniable status as a cinema classic, The Maltese Falcon has become, in a sense, the prototypical private…
Read MoreMonthly Movie Reviews – May, 2011
Here are some two sentence reviews of the movies I watched in April. Stats Movies watched – 16 Movies that were new to me – 12 Teen Comedies – 3 Monthly Masterpieces – Stagecoach, Johnny Guitar May 31 Jane Eyre (2011) – I wasn’t familiar with the story, but this seems to deliver the fancy…
Read MoreIO5M 4: The Top 5 American Directorial Debuts.
Welcome back to my most infrequently occurring Monday feature! I’m speaking, of course, of Infrequently Occurring Fifth Monday (IO5M), where I come up with a new “top 5″ list on a quad-yearly basis. Today’s post takes a look at my all time favorite directorial debuts from American film directors. I though about just doing plain…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 17 – Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)
Johnny Guitar is like no other movie you’ve ever seen. Yes, it is a melodrama, but its overblown dialog ends up making All That Heaven Allows sound like My Night at Maudes. Yes, it is a western, but its overblown colors end up making The Searchers look like McCabe and Mrs. Miller. There is a scene in Ghostbusters (a…
Read MoreMonthly Movie Reviews – April, 2011
Here are some two sentence reviews of the movies I watched in April. Stats Movies watched – 13 Movies that were new to me – 5 OK Corral stories – 2 Monthly Masterpieces – The Lady Eve, My Darling Clementine April 30 The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982) – Pretty weak stuff really, from the convoluted script to…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 16 – My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946)
John Ford is, along with Howard Hawks, one of the quintessential Hollywood western directors. When one thinks of classical American westerns, John Ford films like Stagecoach and The Searchers immediately spring to mind. It is perhaps an overused term, but John Ford’s films really did have a certain “poetry” to them, a sense of hushed…
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