"143"

I have an ongoing love affair with New York, the city that formed me. I was born here, and though I’ve left occasionally, it was never for very long. The pace, color, and excitement of this amazing town always drew me back like a magnet, and holds me still. No surprise then that I love experiencing the potent nostalgia of great films that recall the New York City of my early years.

I will always remember the pure exhilaration I felt watching Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” for the first time in a theater thirty years ago. The memory is so clear of first realizing that I was experiencing an extraordinary piece of filmmaking, deliriously entertaining but also completely fresh and unique. What made “Pulp” so exciting and distinctive?

Top-ten lists of holiday films abound right about now, but what about picking the top three Christmas movies ever made? Certainly there's plenty to choose from. Christmas movies are almost 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.

Ah, that eternal question: which is better, the book or the movie? Though such comparisons are natural, even inevitable, they’re also kind of pointless, since the conventions of each medium differ so markedly. Books explore the dense inner lives of characters in a way movies can’t, while films use sight, sound and motion to create an immediacy books can’t.

Who are you calling “Diva?”   In real life, wrangling with a diva is a blood-boiling lesson in the perils of the high-maintenance personality. On film, though, there is an undeniable deliciousness to watching the diva — at a safe distance.   Divas are so cutting, so presumptuous, so brash, brassy, demanding, withering, larger than life, full of themselves, and they chew through scenery with cast iron teeth. And, in what might just be a law of nature, it often takes a diva to play a diva. 

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. Scanning over tent-pole movies released since the millennium, blockbusters like the “Lord Of The Rings” series clock in at about three hours per installment, while “Avatar” and “The Dark Knight Rises” run well over the two and a half hour mark. Other more recent superhero franchises show the same trend. Examples: “The Avengers” (143 mins.), “Captain America” (136 mins.), and “The Amazing Spiderman” (142 mins.) Then there’s the talented but increasingly self-indulgent Quentin Tarantino, whose pictures most always go on and on. Most recently, “Inglorious Basterds” (153 mins.) and “Django Unchained” (165 mins.) prove my point.