The planning of a forthcoming family road trip has put me in mind of one of the great comedies of the last 50 years, Lost in America, Albert Brooks’ 1985 ode to jumping off the career train, parting with one’s material trappings and basically dropping out of society “like in Easy Rider.” Of course, this being an Albert Brooks movie, things quickly devolve into self-inflicted chaos.
Living in the big city one sadly tends to take certain landmarks and cultural institutions for granted. Take, for instance, the John Hancock Center and Willis (Sears) Tower, two architecturally significant Chicago skyline stalwarts whose burly frames attract visitors from across the globe. And while multitudes daily gawp up at, and down from, these iconic landmarks, The Conflicted Film Snob, who’s seen them maybe a million times in his four-plus
Lonesome Dove, the epic 6.5-hour miniseries, is indeed my pick for the greatest book-to-film adaptation ever. Before we dig into the particulars of the series, let’s quickly take a look a the source material, a sprawling novel (843 pages hardcover, 945 paperback) written by Larry McMurtry.
It’s no easy thing to successfully adapt a beloved piece of literature into an equally satisfying movie. Whereas a book can meander, a movie depends on a certain tightness of structure to keep its running time and budget manageable. Which is why audiences familiar with a particular book often leave the theater grumpy that certain scenes, plot lines and characters have been discarded. On the flip side, a movie adaptation can be too slavish to its
You check out Hail, Caesar! this weekend? The Conflicted Film Snob did. And as a fan of the Coen brothers since their 1984 noirish debut, Blood Simple, I had high hopes for the film, this despite the unusually long review embargo (they didn’t start appearing until just a couple days before release) and subsequent reviews (generally lukewarm).
Actor Abe Vigoda died on Tuesday at the ripe old age of 94. For those of you who watched TV in the mid-70s, you’ll know him as the curmudgeonly, hemorrhoidal Sgt. Philip K. Fish from ABC’s Barney Miller and, later, its short-lived spinoff, Fish.
The recent release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the passing of Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the great cinematographers, got me thinking about the two groundbreaking science fiction epics released back in 1977, George Lucas’ original Star Wars (eventually subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope upon its 1981 theatrical re-release) and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the only movie for which Zsigmond received an Academy Award,
So, you survived Part 1 and, masochist you are, you’re back for even more. Impressive…most impressive.
As you’ll recall, previously we covered in very broad strokes the history of motion picture sound technology. Now let’s take a look at the artists responsible for creating the soundtracks performed via those ever-improving audio technologies. Known within the film industry as “sound designers,” they are
With the exception of a couple of experimental shorts using a process called “Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre” presented at the 1900 Paris Exhibition and, of course, the live piano/organ accompaniment prevalent in the silent era (which doesn’t really count), cinema was purely a visual medium for the first 37 years of its existence.
As cultural anthropology teaches us, with the rise of organized societies came the need to develop rites of passage into adulthood, with many such rituals involving a mature understanding of the concepts at hand and proof of dedication. For example, in Judaism the 13-year-old celebrant of a Bar or Bat Mitzvah must engage in complex Torah cantillation. In Catholicism, the