Apparently, 2017 was the safest year on record for commercial air travel — not a single passenger death. So none of this…
Of course, the minute this went public (on New Year’s Eve), planes start dropping from the sky like maple seeds autorotating to the ground in autumn. In the first three months of 2018, the Russians, Iranians and Bangladeshis have experienced commercial crashes.
Since first laying eyes on the famous General Cinema Feature Presentation bumper playing across the screen in a darkened theater — this as a grade schooler back in the mid-70s — I’d been unabashedly captivated by movies. But it wasn’t until later in the decade that my appreciation for a film’s carefully wrought visuals began to make an impression. The year was 1979, the flick Carrol Ballard’s take on the famous Walter Farley children’s novel,
I think it’s safe to say that Mickey Rourke is a study in contrasts, an actor not just of two distinct careers, but also two distinct faces, the former something to celebrate, the latter best served as a cautionary tale.
Career/Face #1™ entered the public consciousness with his breakout supporting role as charming arsonist Teddy in Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 neo-noir, Body Heat, a film Rourke followed up with, among others, Diner, Rumblefish, The Pope of
For those of you who lap up, like so many Hot Toddies, those treacly Christmas-themed films running up and down the TV dial this time of year to warm your cold, stressed heart in the toasty embers of the season, I’m going to offer up a one-time warning: this post may not be for you. Because in the CFS’s manly world, one filled with bulging pecs, sweat-stained undershirts
I love a good reveal. Done right — think Harry Lime being outed by a splash of light on that shadowy, cobblestoned Viennese street in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), or Colonel Kurtz’s features slowly emerging from the murk as he cools himself with a splash of water in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), or a 200-foot alien tripod rising from a town square in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) — they create indelible moments of tension, wonder, surprise and unease.
In a recent, hugely popular CFS post (∼30 views, 0 comments…and counting!), you might recall that I recycled the well-worn assertion that prose has a distinct advantage over film in how the medium can “get inside people’s heads, which allows for an interior complexity that movies simply can’t hope to match.”
While the literary chops of, say, a Robert James Waller (“I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.” — The Bridges of Madison County) or E. L. James (“Vaguely, I’m aware that I’m still in my sweats, unshowered, yucky, and he’s just gloriously yummy, his pants doing that hanging from the hips thing…Finally, my medulla oblongata recalls its purpose. I breathe…” — Fifty Shades of Grey) are much more formidable, the CFS™ grudgingly accepts the news that Nagasaki-born, British-raised writer Kazuo Ishiguro has been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Such is the immortal nature of images captured on celluloid that even a (self-proclaimed) cineaste occasionally finds himself confusing the dead for the living, an embarrassing scenario that usually plays out thusly: sprawled on the couch, clicker in hand, the CFS stumbles across a film featuring a performance by such-and-such that’s so clever he finds himself activating IMDB’s phone app to see what such-and-such has done lately, only to be reminded that such-and-such now resides in the great proscenium in the sky.
Just when you though this blog couldn’t possibly get any better, we’re back with the long-awaited sixth edition of this continuing series examining the boozy, late-night discovery of cinematic mediocrity and/or hidden treasures back in college. Don’t fret: I’ve got about 20 more of these things in me before I switch the theme to “B-Movie Cult Classics Unearthed Watching Late-Night HBO in Bachelor Pad in Lincoln Park.”
Not to be unkind, but with such mediocrities as Hot Dog…The Movie (1984 teen sex romp with competitive skiing) and Youngblood (1986 Rob Lowe/Patrick Swayze Canadian junior hockey drama) to his credit, one might think that filmmaker Peter Markle couldn’t direct his way out of a popcorn bucket.