45th President of the United States of America, Mr. Donald J. Trump Continue reading
Hot Tub Time Machine Review as Written by Donald J. Trump During Early Morning Tweetstorm
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Category Archives: Miscellany
Cinematography & Editing: Unique Insights into Two Critical Cinematic Arts
As revealed by my admission that the first laserdisc (RIP) I ever purchased was the documentary Visions of Light, anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m a nerd for the art of cinematography.
Hidden/Forgotten Gem: Margin Call
This’ll be short and sweet, neither of which come easy to me.
I stumbled across Margin Call on HBO one evening a couple years after it was released (2011) to critical acclaim but, sadly, middling box office.
Apocalypse Now: A Smorgasbord of Thoughts
Been a while. Bike accidents, vacations, life, etc.
Anyway, went to see Apocalypse Now (1979) the other day at Chicago’s Navy Pier IMAX, which, unlike the local multiplex version of the format (snarkily referred to as “LieMax”), happens to be the real deal (60’H x 86’W
Big Night: Movie as Metaphor
Be it his turn as flamboyant TV host Caesar Flickerman in The Hunger Games I-IV, empathetic refuge scientist Abraham Erskine in Captain America: The First Avenger or long-suffering magazine art director Nigel Kipling in The Devil Wears Prada, Stanley Tucci has proven time and again to be one of our finest character actors.
Ranked: Every James Bond Theme Song! (Pt. 3)
Let’s end this, shall we?Ranked: Every James Bond Theme Song! (Pt. 1)
Bond theme songs, ranked.
Yeah, it’s been done before. But not by the CFS via his patent-pending toolbox of complicated song-ranking algorithms. Which is another way of saying that what follows isn’t subjective, but rather accurate to within a micrometer of the empirical truth. Because there’s no fake news on the CFS’s blog, only brilliance built on the foundation of a very, very small loan I got from my father many years ago.
RIP Tom Wolfe: He Whose Movie Adaptations Were Feast or Famine
Unless you live under a proverbial rock, you’ll know that journalist/author/dandy Tom Wolfe died on May 14 at the ripe age of 88. I won’t rehash his impact on American arts and letters — there’s been plenty of ink spilled for just that purpose the last week or so, including this obit in the “failing” and now “crooked” The New York Times.
RIP Anne V. Coates
It’s doubtful that many of you will recognize the name Anne V. Coates. Such is the lot of a film editor, unknown to all but a handful of film geeks as he or she toils in the shadows of an editing suite, sweating over hundreds of thousands of feet of film (or nowadays, digital image capture), shaping it one cut at a time into something resembling a tightly paced, coherent narrative.
The Book Adaptation That Regrettably Never Was (Yet?)
Believe it or not, if you look past all the zombie nonsense they keep churning out well past its sell-by date, the American basic cable channel AMC has become the gold standard for multi-part adaptations of dense, complicated books.
This first occurred to me in 2016 when the channel aired The Night Manager, an adaptation of John le Carré’s 1993 best-seller. Not only did the program boast fine direction,