Top-ten lists of holiday films abound right about now, but what about picking the top three Christmas movies ever made? Lord knows there’s plenty to choose from. Christmas movies are a genre unto themselves: between live-action and animated features, there are literally hundreds of titles out there. Inevitably, some are pretty bad, others amusingly cheesy. Given all this choice and … More Details
I don’t know how many of you were lucky enough to catch the recent profile on “60 Minutes” with Morley Safer interviewing our most famous living historian, David McCullough. The author of countless volumes which all make the past accessible and very much alive, McCullough has gone on record to bemoan the younger generation’s limited understanding and appreciation of history- … More Details
Grace Kelly would have turned 83 today, which only highlights the tragic fact that she’s been gone exactly thirty years now. When I heard of her untimely death all those years ago, I remember thinking what most of her public must have thought: that her life had been just as dramatic and eventful as any of her films. Her ascendancy … More Details
I suppose it sounds snooty, but I’m really tired of those teen horror movie entries that get trotted out every Halloween. I mean, we have children who are worried about getting employment and don’t even go trick-or-treating anymore. Who could believe that soon-to-be codgers like us would want to watch I Know What You Did Last Summer, Nightmare on Elm … More Details
Fifty years ago tomorrow, the first James Bond entry, Dr. No, premiered in London. Twenty-one (soon to be twenty-two) features later, Bond stands as the highest grossing film series of all time, adjusted for inflation, grossing five billion dollars worldwide. With the last Bond film costing over $200 million to produce, even with inflation it’s striking that Dr. No was … More Details
Talk about a movie aging gracefully. For my birthday last Saturday night, we invited over a group of our closest friends to screen the newly released blu-ray edition of 1952′s Singin’ In The Rain. Though I expected a delightful experience, truly timeless movies have a way of surprising you with each new viewing, however many times you’ve seen them. Last … More Details
I found it interesting (if not particularly surprising) that the top box office performers of the last several decades have tended to be longer movies. For example, blockbusters like the Lord Of The Rings series clock in at about three hours per installment, while Avatar and The Dark Knight Rises are both well over the two and a half hour … More Details
A couple of weeks back I noted an interesting item in The Hollywood Reporter stating that in the latest Sight and Sound poll conducted among 846 “movie experts”, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo had displaced Citizen Kane as the greatest film of all time. I confess I was stunned that this august group had picked a movie that, in my humble opinion, … More Details
Friday night’s horrifying slaughter in a Colorado movie theatre raises the same old issue that never seem to get solved in this country: Gun control… and the NRA’s seemingly inexorable grip on Congress. How many times do we have to compare our country’s atrocious number of gun-related deaths against the rest of the civilized world before we wake up and … More Details
About a month ago, I was watching an early Cagney entry called Taxi! (1932), and in one early scene, witnessed the diminutive actor of Irish/Norwegian stock speaking Yiddish… not one or two words, mind you, but paragraphs. And I thought to myself — yet another reason to love Jimmy Cagney. As if we needed any more. In fact, Cagney learned … More Details
