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…
Earlier this week, I mentioned I spent last weekend sorting out my favorite films, circa 2016. Well, yes. And love ya, Dame Julie, but that film didn’t make the 2012 list. Part of the fun of doing this biennial sort is to compare my current favorites to years past and see what has changed. For that reason, I’m sharing both the previous sorts I did using my current sorting method of pairwise comparison. As with…
This past weekend I had some free time. What do project managers do with free time? Make lists! Specifically, I decided it was time once again for my biennial Favorite Films sort. (you can find posts about the favorite film here). Creating a list of favorite films has been something I’ve been doing since at least the late 80s, but my current method is something I’ve been doing since 2012 and have found easy –and not…
Being proud of our Norwegian heritage and an above-average amateur historian, our dad made sure we knew from an early age that real Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets. But why do so many people think so? An article in Vox gets to the root cause. Dang costume designers. Growing up, we didn’t have a wealth of Viking drama, so it was inevitable that the family would seek out what they could. That inevitably led to that…
Reading a recent piece reflecting on the demise of video stores, specifically independent video stores, made me reflect on the demise of Video Vault, an indie film mainstay in Alexandria that supplied film fans for a generation. Mike Musgrove’s article in the Washington Post about the Vault’s closing gives one a good idea of the pressures that made it close. That article is probably a good warm-up for the aforementioned piece on indie video stores.…
Roger Corman, the indefatigable indie film icon, has apparently fallen afoul of financial shenanigans because of others’ mismanagement as detailed in this piece by Eriq Gardner in The Hollywood Reporter. I, for one, am looking forward to Death Race 2050.
I finally saw it today. You know, that space movie I was talking about the other day. I can now roam the Internet freely. I liked it. That’s about all I will tell you. If you liked the original trilogy, you should like it. If you liked the prequels, I still don’t see why you wouldn’t like it. In fact, if you were planning to see it, go ahead and see it already. Don’t you…