It’s been months since I’ve posted. No doubt this has been emotionally draining for my count-on-one-hand group of regulars.
The reason? I’ve come into a significant inheritance. I know…lucky bastard, right?
This is my 100th blogpost. Assuming I averaged maybe 1,250 words/blog, that’s 125,000 words. Just typing that number makes my carpal tunnel flare. Anyway, to celebrate this historic(ally non-momentous) occasion, let me return to my favorite guy, the one who’s still having trouble letting go. Sorry but I just can’t help myself. It’s like clubbing to death baby harp seals as they climb out of the ocean. Easy pickins!
When you think of a perfect film what comes to mind?
Citizen Kane, perhaps? Hitchcock’s Vertigo? The Godfather? The Rules of the Game? Chinatown? Some other auteur-helmed flick listed in Sight & Sound magazine’s once-a-decade “Greatest Films of All Time” list?
No, this post isn’t about weed. Or that Claire Denis sci-fi film starring Cedric Diggory. Rather, it’s about beer commercials. Which, edited within an inch of their lives, full of overwrought reaction shots by actors of middling talent (or anthropomorphized animals) and, of course, heavy on the jiggle factor, generally suck. (Unless, of course, you fall into the male 12-34 years demo.)
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
Today, I signed legislation to hold China accountable for its oppressive actions against the people of Hong Kong. It’s the first time anybody’s ever done anything like that. I did this myself, for the most part.
I don’t know about you, but the byproducts of COVID-19 isolation—soul-crushing ennui, crippling depression, nightmares in which Mike Pence calls me “mother” before sneezing in my face—has made the thought of writing a movie blogpost about as appealing as a nasopharyngeal swab.
Wrapping up our series on biological disaster flicks, we officially plow into the side of a mountain with a movie so bad, it’s good.
Full disclosure: this film was “Made for TV” (ABC-TV as it happens). And while a certain demographic may shrug at the news (after all, Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad were “Made for TV”!), those of us old enough to have survived
The Andromeda Strain (1971; Dir. Robert Wise)Quick Synopsis—A U.S. satellite crashes the desert outside a small town in New Mexico. When a recovery team sent to retrieve the device abruptly stops transmitting, concerned government officials activate “Wildfire,”
In 1944, in an attempt to bolster a British morale deflated by hardship both home and abroad, Sir Lawrence Olivier co-adapted, directed and starred in Shakespeare’s Henry V, a bit of altruism (narcissism?) that not only went over big with critics and the general public, but also garnered him a special Academy Award. Mission accomplished!
You ever found yourself surveying the accumulation of detritus that is your abode, thinking: Christ, what a shit-show? And pledging to yourself that, come the weekend, all that bric-a-brac, all those bits and bobs, all that knick-knackery, will be donated to the Salvation Army so…help…you…God!