"milk"

While fully acknowledging his prodigious talent, the prevailing sentiment of the critical community seems to be that Marlon Brando was a remote, tortured man who squandered his prodigious talent for easy money. Some folks sounded downright miffed, as if a good kick in Brando’s voluminous rear-end might have shocked him back to a full appreciation of just what he owed his public.

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?

On this Labor Day weekend back in 1982, a significant event took place that was little noted at the time: a movie opened called “Fast Times At Ridgemont High.” In fact, so little was expected of this modest high school comedy that Universal Pictures almost opted not to release it on the East Coast.

There's a lot of talk these days about disruption and disruptors. But there used to be another name for those who challenged norms: trailblazers. You might also have heard them called “rebels,” “visionaries,” or “iconoclasts.”

How often we wish we had a crack team of screenwriters scripting our lives, especially when the moment calls for a tart tongue. One of the many pleasures of the movies is that we can watch as others tackle the smack-talk for us, and revel in idealized comedowns delivered with serious relish.

I’ll never forget the segment on “60 Minutes” a couple of years ago, when Morley Safer interviewed our most famous living historian, David McCullough.