First some housekeeping: for those hearty souls who read this post (<5), you’ll be excited to learn that I’ve begun my annual read of Rose by Martin Cruz Smith, number 15 by my count. Feel free to check it out for the first time.
With that bit of smug superiority out of the system (or is it a sad admission?), let us turn our attention to today’s blogpost, a relative quickie…
With writer/director Paul Schrader currently in the news for his critically lauded new film, First Reformed, it might be a good time to discuss one of his earlier efforts, one known to about five people outside of The Criterion Collection enthusiasts and a favorite of yours truly since checking it out on VHS back in the late 1980s.
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.
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.
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,
Well, I had another post in the works but the passing of two favorites, one a director, the other an actor, preempts our regularly scheduled programming.
Miloš Forman
While the great unwashed may not be familiar with the name, you certainly know his work, which I’ll get to in a moment. But first:
Apparently, 2017 was the safest year on record for commercial air travel — not a single passenger death. So none of this…
Of course, the minute this went public (on New Year’s Eve), planes start dropping from the sky like maple seeds autorotating to the ground in autumn. In the first three months of 2018, the Russians, Iranians and Bangladeshis have experienced commercial crashes.
Since first laying eyes on the famous General Cinema Feature Presentation bumper playing across the screen in a darkened theater — this as a grade schooler back in the mid-70s — I’d been unabashedly captivated by movies. But it wasn’t until later in the decade that my appreciation for a film’s carefully wrought visuals began to make an impression. The year was 1979, the flick Carrol Ballard’s take on the famous Walter Farley children’s novel,
I think it’s safe to say that Mickey Rourke is a study in contrasts, an actor not just of two distinct careers, but also two distinct faces, the former something to celebrate, the latter best served as a cautionary tale.
Career/Face #1™ entered the public consciousness with his breakout supporting role as charming arsonist Teddy in Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 neo-noir, Body Heat, a film Rourke followed up with, among others, Diner, Rumblefish, The Pope of
For those of you who lap up, like so many Hot Toddies, those treacly Christmas-themed films running up and down the TV dial this time of year to warm your cold, stressed heart in the toasty embers of the season, I’m going to offer up a one-time warning: this post may not be for you. Because in the CFS’s manly world, one filled with bulging pecs, sweat-stained undershirts