Welcome to BlogHub: the Best in Veteran and Emerging Classic Movie Blogs
You can rate and share your favorite classic movie posts here.
You can rate and share your favorite classic movie posts here.
The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933, Clyde Bruckman)
The Stop Button Posted by on Jun 16, 2011
As it turns out–it’s hard to tell from the first ten minutes–The Fatal Glass of Beer is something of a spoof of melodramas. Those first ten minutes though are mostly just W.C. Fields being a gold prospector in a snow storm. There’s very little narrative. Fields introduces on read more
Warning Red (1956, Nicholas Webster)
The Stop Button Posted by on Jun 9, 2011
What’s strange about Warning Red—a Federal Civil Defense Administration commissioned short about atomic attack—is how effective some of the short can be. Not the silly stuff about the nuclear attack or the neighborhood banding together, but the actual procedural. Joseph Cunningham heads all over read more
Romance with a Double Bass (1974, Robert Young)
The Stop Button Posted by on Jun 7, 2011
It’s hard to know where to start with Romance with a Double Bass. I suppose one could call it a comedy of errors, but the error in question is skinny dipping. First John Cleese, as a musician, goes skinny dipping and then Connie Booth, as the princess whose betrothal ball he is engaged to play at, read more
Escape from New York (1981, John Carpenter)
The Stop Button Posted by on Jun 3, 2011
Man and boy, I’ve probably seen Escape from New York ten times. This viewing might be the first where I noticed the film’s quietness. Carpenter uses the relative silence to make the first third (even before Isaac Hayes shows up), the most memorable parts of the film. Some of that memora read more
The Package (1989, Andrew Davis)
The Stop Button Posted by on May 27, 2011
If it weren’t for the cast and direction, I’m not sure how The Package would play. The combination of Gene Hackman and Andrew Davis makes the film, which has a bunch of problems, noteworthy. Davis gives the film enough grit and realism to make it seem wholly believable, just so long as read more
N.Y., N.Y. (1957, Francis Thompson)
The Stop Button Posted by on May 24, 2011
N.Y., N.Y. is, ostensibly, a day in the city. It opens in the early morning, features a man waking for work, movies through a series of daytime shots, finally finishing with shots of night in the city and nighttime activities. However, Thompson has no narrative. He uses special kaleidoscope lenses read more
About
The Stop Button Posted by Andrew Wickliffe on May 16, 2011
Hello, and welcome, to the Stop Button “About” page. I’m Andrew Wickliffe and I’ve been blogging here so long the site can get a driving permit. I write about movies, comics, and television. On rare occasion, I write longer pieces in hopes of driving traffic to the older pie read more
Manhatta (1921, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler)
The Stop Button Posted by on May 12, 2011
About three quarters of Strand and Sheeler’s shots in Manhatta could just be stills. It’s less about the camera being motionless than about the subjects being motionless. While the subjects are varied, a lot of them are related to the water—whether the tugboats or the ocean liners or the docks, read more
Boxing Gloves (1929, Robert A. McGowan)
The Stop Button Posted by on May 5, 2011
It’s hard not to like Boxing Gloves’s central sequence—a boxing match between Norman ‘Chubby’ Chaney and Joe Cobb—it’s two little fat kids in enormous boxing gloves duking it out. It’s also the sequence where McGowan shows the most directorial zeal. Unfortunately, it’s the place where read more
Rendezvous (1976, Claude Lelouch)
The Stop Button Posted by on May 3, 2011
Okay, I’m not the only one who wondered if Rendezvous might have been dubbed. The short is a high speed drive through Paris—sometimes the pace seems questionable, like Lelouch was able to speed it up (which seems unlikely in most parts, because other cars move at a normal pace) and the traffic patt read more
The Stuff (1985, Larry Cohen)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 25, 2011
According to IMDb, Larry Cohen cut about a half hour out of The Stuff. It’s entirely possible with that added footage, the movie might have made sense. As it’s cut now, it’s a somewhat diverting–at least until the third act–cross between The Blob and Invasion of the Bo read more
About
The Stop Button Posted by Andrew Wickliffe on Apr 18, 2011
Hello, and welcome, to the Stop Button “About” page. I’m Andrew Wickliffe and I’ve been blogging here so long the site can get a driving permit. I write about movies, comics, and television. On rare occasion, I write longer pieces in hopes of driving traffic to the older pie read more
Salem’s Lot (1979, Tobe Hooper)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 15, 2011
During Salem’s Lot’s finale, Hooper gets this amazing physical performance out of Bonnie Bedelia as she is exploring the vampire’s lair. At that moment, I realized Hooper was intentionally making Lot palatable for a television audience—he could have made the entire three hours terrifying, but read more
Age of Consent (1969, Michael Powell)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 13, 2011
With Age of Consent, Powell bewilders. His approach to James Mason and Helen Mirren’s dramatic arcs is excellent, but then he includes this terrible comedy material. He’s got a bunch of slapstick in an otherwise very gentle drama. Mason is a successful artist who feels like a sellout so he runs read more
Let It Ride (1989, Joe Pytka)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 8, 2011
I wonder how Let It Ride would play if it were competently made. Pytka’s not a terrible director, but he’s not any good either. His mediocre composition is undone by the absolutely atrocious song choices for the soundtrack. The film would probably be better with no changes other than that track read more
The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975, Gene Wilder)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 1, 2011
I didn’t know what to expect from The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, other than some of the principals of Young Frankenstein to reunite. As it turns out, Smarter Brother is Frankenstein’s younger brother. For his first directorial outing, Wilder basically just mimics Brooks’s read more
Silver Blaze (1977, John Davies)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 31, 2011
Christopher Plummer makes a strange Sherlock Holmes—he’s almost too much of a movie star to play him. Plummer has a great time, creating a mildly mischievous Holmes who willfully appears eccentric. It’s too bad he’s the only interesting thing about Silver Blaze. I suppose some of Davies’s read more
The Frisco Kid (1979, Robert Aldrich)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 30, 2011
The Frisco Kid is a Western, but it doesn’t open like one. It opens more like a seventies Gene Wilder theme comedy (composer Frank De Vol starts out like it’s Young Frankenstein, but quickly gets bad… especially at the end). The film takes a little while to ground itself. Before Harrison Ford read more
Thank You Mask Man (1971, Jeff Hale)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 24, 2011
I’m not even sure how to describe Thank You Mask Man. It’s a Lenny Bruce routine animated—it’s about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, which isn’t completely clear at the beginning. At the beginning, it’s more about the idea of a hero and the problem with him not accepting thanks for his actions. read more
Hardware Wars (1978, Ernie Fosselius)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 17, 2011
The best thing about Hardware Wars, in terms of actual quality and imaginative creative impulse, is recasting Chewbacca as a brown version of the Cookie Monster (except here it’s the Wookie Monster). Director Fosselius introduces it sort of as a gag, but then develops it. The puppet gives costar Bo read more