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I must have learned about Ritchie Valens through Don McLean’s “American Pie.” Because there was a time when I was fascinated by all the musical references that seemed so oblique to my young mind. Eventually, the songwriter’s ode leads you to “The Day The Music Died̶ read more

I hold an immediate affinity for the images at the core of Mystery Train: A Japanese couple (Youki Kudo and Masatoshi Nagase) riding a train. This is the ’80s so they’ve got a walkman with an audiocassette tape, and it’s blaring Elvis! It becomes apparent they are making a pilgrim read more

Before he became a caricature of his former self, even before the days of Captain Kirk and pop culture canonization, The Intruder is a reminder of something else in William Shatner. He still feels ripe and almost dangerous with a charisma that has yet to be calcified or even corroded by time. The s read more

Keir Dullea is an actor who will always be most prominently remembered for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He’s Dave of pod door fame. However, part of me wants to promote him as the lead in David and Lisa because this film from Frank Perry, in its quiet empathy and emerging re read more

The aesthetic of The Little Fugitive is made plain thanks to chalk drawing credits playing over “Home on The Range.” We are about to enter a little boy’s world with all the joys and menial problems an adolescent life engenders. The key is giving these problems credence. Because in read more

Nobuhiko Obayashi is known to a pocket of western moviegoers for his crazy, unhinged haunted house flick Hausu (1977), but as I’ve gotten more familiar with at least some of his filmography, I’ve come to appreciate his more grounded works. Using this phrase has the danger of giving the w read more

This is my entry in the Spring CMBA Blogathon Debuts and Last Hurrahs. In the isolated occasions when I had to debate in high school history classes those who did this kind of thing for fun and seemed most destined for politics , were all people I would never want to vote for regardless of affiliati read more

Rooney, Gleason, and Quinn in the film version Requiem for a Heavyweight was an early live television production that was so popular it garnered a feature-length adaptation a few years later. It’s relatively easy to see the merits in both because although they enlisted the same director and sc read more

As the saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall and Toro is a big man. He’s a sculptable Argentinian bumpkin who will quickly be fashioned into a killer in the boxing ring. Rod Steiger plays Nick Benko, a shifty promoter looking to groom his latest talent and set him up for succ read more

Zone of Interest opens with a blank screen and a collage of sound; it’s almost like it’s priming us for the movie ahead. Because it’s not a conventional movie by any stretch of the imagination. It’s difficult to put arbitrary labels like good and bad on it since it’s so read more

We’ve been doing a rather casual retrospective on the films of George Sanders and as part of the series, we thought it would be fitting to highlight three more of his performances. They run the gamut of literary adaptations, fantasy romances, and medieval yarns. Sanders remains his incorrigib read more

This Land in Mine initiates itself as a memorial to WWI. We see a statue with a crouching soldier. It’s inscribed with the following message: “In memory of those who died to bring peace to the world.” In the foreground as the Nazi juggernaut rolls into town. Because peace has not read more

A place with a name like Okefenokee feels immanently American and this is an inherently American story though expatriate Jean Renoir feels sympathetic to these types of folks. He wasn’t a working-class filmmaker but in movies from his home country like Toni or La Bete Humaine, you see his con read more

I feel like few filmmakers understood the menace of the Nazis as well as Fritz Lang. Perhaps it’s because he had firsthand experience, and he knew their schemes and what they were capable of — at least to a degree. But he does not make them total fools nor distant adversaries. They are read more

Seeing the Twin Towers on celluloid always brings a bit of a wistful reaction because there presence represents so much. It feels like a line in the sand and there are those who know that far better than me. The last time I recall having this sense was watching Peter Bogdanovich’s They All La read more

If you’re a bit of a finicky nerd for cultural context like myself, you realize right when we hear Brenton Wood’s “Oogum Boogum Song” wafting down the city street from a car radio, we can carbon-date the scene to around 1967. A marine steps off a bus with a slight limp. He m read more

Peter Bogdanovich lost his girlfriend Dorothy Stratten to tragedy in 1981 and after the release of their picture together, They All Laughed, it was anyone’s guess if he’d ever be able to return to directing. I’ve heard an often-repeated anecdote that he ultimately decided to take read more

I know only very little about River Phoenix’s upbringing but somehow it’s easy for me to make the leap from his real-life existence to his family in this movie. Running on Empty has to do with an unconventional upbringing. Danny Pope (that’s his real name) has grown up with his li read more

Pump Up The Volume is a movie that tackles the existential malaise of the generation beyond After Hours and Something Wild. I’ve never been particularly good at charting the shifts in generational demographics, but the film is definitely an adolescent jeremiad for Gen Xers. In truth, I only l read more

“Do you think he drinks?” “He didn’t get that nose from playing ping pong.” Self-reflexive metanarratives have the capacity of dissecting celebrity and playing with personas. Such a context is ripe with possibility and so when we find ourselves on a studio lot with W.C read more