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.
Watching a hirsute Leonardo DiCaprio (as frontiersman Hugh Glass in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant) defy innumerable odds–including, but not limited to: Indian attack; protracted bear mauling; burial alive; river rapids and waterfall plunge; a sweat-lodge fever; likely food poisoning from raw fish and buffalo liver; a fall from a cliff while galloping on a horse; a night spent inside the aforementioned horse, now gutted; bathing
If you’re of a certain age, your first introduction to the great Alan Rickman wouldn’t have been as Snape in the Harry Potter films, but rather as master criminal Hans Gruber in John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988), a film that launched into the public’s consciousness both Bruce Willis’ receding hairline and one of cinema’s great villains:
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.
When one creates a blog this accessible, this entertaining, this literate, one must accept that, in due course, an incredible amount of electronic fan mail likely will pass over the transom. And while my introverted half would prefer to hide deep within the dark recesses of that ivory tower known as film knowledge/arcana, the extroverted side understands that it is critical to maintain a relationship with the great unwashed.
British author Ruth Rendell died this May, at age 85, a few months after suffering a debilitating stroke. Rendell, one of literature’s formost practitioners of thrillers and psychological murder mysteries, was not particularly well known to American readers, readers who, judging by The New York Times “Best Sellers List,” preferred to spend their precious free time
Every hear of The Criterion Collection? No? Well, it’s the company I hold responsible for my crack-like addiction to the latest and greatest home video formats of the last 20 years. Founded back in 1984, The Criterion Collection entered the home video marketplace with a lofty but admirable goal, conveniently printed on each of its releases: “…to gather the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions of the highest quality.”
Two recent untimely deaths–those of 43-year-old actress Amanda Peterson and 61-year-old ex-pro-grappler/actor Roddy Piper (the former not entirely unexpected, the latter of natural causes)–got me thinking about the movies that made them famous*, Peterson acting** in 1987’s Can’t Buy Me Love (co-starring the nerd who would one day grow up to be auto-racing enthusiast
Back in 2004, director Steven Spielberg decided the time was ripe to remake the granddaddy of all hostile alien narratives, H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, the 1898 serialized novel telling the story of a Martian invasion as seen through the eyes of an unnamed narrator based in Surrey and his younger brother, based in London. This would be quite a departure for
As with any narrative art form, crafting a satisfying ending to movie is a tricky proposition. Even the strongest works can fall victim to a last few minutes that don’t quite follow through on the promise that preceded them. And while I don’t think a weak ending totally ruins a good movie, it certainly can leave you feeling a bit cheated. One such example, for me, at least, involves