Let’s pretend for a moment that you didn’t pass high-school English by the skin of your teeth and you actually spent some quality time with the poems of Emily Dickinson, specifically this one:
Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
A minor medical scare this past weekend has resulted in the hospitalization of the Conflicted Film Snob, a shocking turn of events considering the robustness of health he felt getting out of bed on Saturday morning. Worse still, the forced downtime has given him much too much time to dwell on mortality while staring at his non-slip socks.
The untimely passing of His Royal Badness has offered up one bittersweet positive: various movie-theater chains are showing a limited engagement of Purple Rain (1984) on the big screen.
Back in the fall of 1984, at the tender age of 15, The Conflicted Film Snob was lucky enough to see the film with some friends during its original
The Conflicted Film Snob is getting a new roof today. That’s the good news. The bad new (in addition to the financial outlay) is that the noise is unbelievably distracting, as if a half-dozen man-sized woodpeckers were trying to breach the worn shingles in order to pluck me from my chair and eat me as a snack.
Mike Figgis, wherefore art thou? For those of you who don’t recognize the name, Figgis had himself a nice little cinematic run for about a decade, his first success coming with 1988’s satisfyingly noirish Stormy Monday, which starred Melanie Griffith’s fiery red, downright explosive 80s hair (coiffure soon to be overshadowed by her turn in Working Girl), a very young Sean Bean, Tommy Lee Jones and, yes, our favorite history teacher turned golden rock God, Gordon Matthew Thomas “Sting” Sumner**…
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.
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.