Actor and stunt choreographer Ke Huy Quan has not been on my mind until recently. I may not have seen Temple of Doom, where he played Short Round, this millennium. I only saw The Goonies for the first time last year (friends know I regret nothing) and Data was probably my favorite of the Bad News Oregonians. And then Everything Everywhere All at Once came out this year and was entirely up my off-kilter-but-emotionally-truthful alley.…
TCM does a great montage every year of the film folks we’ve lost. It never fails to make me want to rewatch a film or three. This year, we lost a couple actors particularly dear to my cinemania, David Warner and Angela Lansbury. They’ve gotten better about making sure their videos are on YouTube, so you can check out past editions, including the recent 2021, 2020, and 2019 — the last of which I find…
Earlier this week, I mentioned doing the sort of my biennial favorite films list. My favorite film for a few years back in the pre-Internet era (well, pre-Netscape Navigator for sticklers) was the experimental, non-narrative film Koyaanisqatsi. Technically a documentary, I suppose, but really more of a visual essay. It uses a variety of slow-motion, time-lapse, and regular speed, but breathtaking, cinematography resulting in a film unlike anything I had seen before. It may also…
Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury has died at the age of 96. You can read obituaries and appreciations of her career in: The AV Club Collider Deadline NPR The New York Times Variety Vogue The Washington Post, and Disney (she was, of course, a “Disney Legend”) And if you want to celebrate her many parts singing memorable songs, Playbill has a wonderful video compilation. Amazing that she simply termed her voice “serviceable.” Indeed, if you find…
On this date in 1997, the TV show Stargate SG-1 premiered. To this day, 25 years later, that still elicits “wait, like that 90s film Stargate?” Indeed. The series soldiered on through 10 seasons and a couple wrap-up movies. Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe followed, and a legion of fans are still very much around for this lesser known, but very much beloved “star” franchise. Over at Inverse, Ryan Britt details some of the ways…
Top Gun: Maverick performed some “best of the best” box office maneuvers when it opened Memorial Day weekend and continues to do well. The original film proved to be as much a recruitment commercial as popcorn movie… and this sequel’s premiere aboard an aircraft carrier, Midway (now a museum ship), hints that this newest film will perform similarly. As a cinemaniac who’s seen more than a few military-themed movies over the decades, Hollywood’s connection to…
The ferryman guided a special soul across the river earlier this week. Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou, known to professionally as Vangelis, died this past Tuesday at the age of 79. You can read remembrances, appreciations, and obituaries from: Rolling Stone AP BBC NPR Variety The AV Club Many a cinephile will know Vangelis immediately, but for many of us, we came of age and found our love for both film and film music right when Vangelis…
Okay, I was going to post something else today, but then thanks to Andrew M. Edwards of Blue Police Box Music, you’re getting a short, but so, so sweet video. There was an online discussion of the upcoming ultra-HD release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and conversation, quite naturally, turned to the iconic score by composer Jerry Goldsmith. Now, Goldsmith loved “esoteric instruments” as this article points out — and for the noise of…
Bo McCready has done every cinephile a solid by taking film genre data (as tagged on IMDb) and creating this visualization via Tableau. Now, considering that this is over 100 years’ worth of films… and thousands and thousands of films, this is quite interesting. However, if you look at the visualization above, you’ll see a given genre waxing and waning in relation to its maximum percentage of the overall number of films released that year…
As I’ve mentioned various times, my dad made sure we saw many of the classic and not so classic films from bygone ages. I mean, I’ve seen pre-Russian Revolution films using stop-action animation of insects for crying out loud! Now, besides such curiosities and rattling good stories, these films provided de facto period pieces: they were recording the here and now of an era long past –in human terms– with details quite unknown to me.…