A quickie before I disappear down that rabbit hole known as the 2019 Masters Tournament…
I won’t bore you with a full write-up of the life and times of the character actor Seymour Cassell, probably best known to cineastes as a regular in
I don’t know about you, but I’m really struggling with the news that comedian, poet and dancer Nipsey Russell was gunned down in L.A. on Sunday, March 31, 2019. Admittedly, one of the things that’s making it more difficult to process my grief is that I could’ve sworn Russell died a while back.
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.
I don’t know about you, but the 1992 Kevin Costner/Whitney Houston vehicle, The Bodyguard, remains a guilty pleasure 25 years (!) on. Ably directed by Mick Jackson, the film features a reliably sturdy performance by Costner, a bunch of hit songs sung by Houston that more than compensate for her wobbly acting, a surprise appearance by Ralph Waite (Mr. Walton from The Waltons) during his late career renaissance (he also appeared in
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
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: