It has come to my attention that some people out there on the Interwebs still cling to the notion that Die Hard, the celebrated action film starring Bruce Willis, is not a Christmas movie. Look, Gremlins counts as a Christmas movie, Edward Scissorhands counts as a Christmas movie, and –Lord help us all– Santa Claus Conquers the Martians counts as a Christmas movie. So yes, “the Christmas episode” of action movies does indeed count as…
The holiday season is upon us and, since it’s an even year, it’s almost time for the biennial ranking of my 50 Favorite Films. For those of you obsessed with processes or those of you waiting for an appointment and have exhausted old magazines in a waiting room, read on! I’m a lifelong movie buff and have watched literally thousands of movies. Not all of them are good. Some of the good films are, nonetheless,…
Since it’s “Shark Week” here on my blog, I thought it would only be appropriate to share this wonderful retrospective from Aja Romano over on Vox about our ongoing love affair with all manner of shark movies. I mean, you may recall that I love creature features and shared an excellent resource with which to follow up on them. Therefore, I offer this article as a targeted way to catch up on your movies with…
Turner Classic Movies (TCM), always releases their end of year remembrance a couple weeks early. Then they update it in case someone passes near the end of the year. I don’t care. I watch both versions. Even if you don’t recognize everyone, there’s always plenty to make you wistful… and remind you that a certain film or three is worth re-watching. Verklempt, right? And of course, they nailed the landing.
They say all good things come to an end. In the case of podcasts and online video series, I suppose you don’t know how good a thing is until it’s gone. So it was with some sadness that I took the time to read the postmortem by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou explaining how their YouTube series, Every Frame a Painting had come to an end. A friend and fellow fan of the series sent the essay to me and…
Every summer –for at least a decade or more– the Hollywood film industry has been doomed. I would imagine they must get sick of all the doom, what with being doomed with the advent of television, the disintegration of the studio system, the rise of VCRs and video stores, online streaming, streaming services like Netflix making their own content — and possibly avocado toast. Nevertheless, within the traditional ‘doom’ narrative, there may be trends, so…
Growing up a cinemaniac, there are, quite naturally, a number of actors and directors and screenwriters I would like to meet. However, I daresay I would not shake the hand of any of them so vigorously as I would the hand of film historian and critic, Leonard Maltin. Maltin’s indispensable and always entertaining movie guide was a fixture in our household. Not only did we get each annual edition, but we held on to the…
Growing up in the DC area, my dad made full use of all the free film series places like the National Archives, Library of Congress, and East Gallery would provide. And, of course, he’d take us along. It was at these places that I first saw such classics as To Kill a Mockingbird, Fort Apache, and Gone with the Wind. “It was TCM before TCM,” I explained. Earlier this week, the man who epitomized Turner…
It’s time, once again, for my biennial 50 Favorite Films. Okay, granted I’ve been doing it offline intermittently for about 30 years, but for comparison, you can also see my 2012 list and 2014 list. You can also read about how I rank the films via a pairwise comparison sort based on the criteria of quality, watchability, and personal resonance. There were significant changes this year, something that convinces me this is a fun exercise…
Every two years, I do a sort to come up with my 50 favorite films. You can see the 2012 version here, and the 2016 version will go up tomorrow. The actual pool of films I rank usually numbers in the hundreds. That’s because I’ve found that some films will dramatically change in ranking. For that reason –and the amount of time needed to do the rankings and write them all down– I only do the ranking every two…