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.
Dead End (1937, William Wyler)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 8, 2020
If you tilt to just the right angle, for a while you can see Dead End as the tale of three people from a poor neighborhood and how life has worked out for them as they got closer to their thirties. Humphrey Bogart grew from a “not too bad” young punk to a public enemy number one, infamous for killi read more
Batman: Dead End (2003, Sandy Collora)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 7, 2020
Batman: Dead End goes far in validating the idea of cosplay as successful costuming for film—well, not Andrew Koenig’s Joker—but definitely the Batman outfit. Costume designer Michael MacFarlane, cinematographer Vincent E. Toto, and director Collora do figure out a way to do a “comics accurate” read more
Hunters (2020) s01e01 – In the Belly of the Whale
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 7, 2020
“Hunters” fully realizes the potential of a popular entertainment revenge action-drama. There’s the Marathon Man-esque scene—not a Nazi dentist scene but a Nazi toy shop owner (a perfect Kenneth Tigar; “Hunters” seems like it’s going to be way too good at casting its Nazis)—but it ends read more
Star Trek: Picard (2020) s01e07 – Nepenthe
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 6, 2020
This episode of “Picard” has a Vulcan in cool sunglasses, who non-consensually mind melds, which used to be a thing, and talks about 300 gigabytes of data (hashtag details), a Romulan in a Battlefield Earth fighter jet, discount Han Solo sucking on a cigar, a 23rd century Alexa, the Black woman read more
Sphere (1998, Barry Levinson)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 6, 2020
Sphere is not a justifiable use of eighty million dollars. I don’t think you could justify spending a dollar to rent a copy to watch, much less eighty million of them to make the thing. The big problem is the script. Whatever Kurt Wimmer (ominously credited with “adaptation”), Stephen Hauser, read more
We’re With the Army Now (1943, Jean Negulesco)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 5, 2020
We’re With the Army Now is somewhat inexplicably a rarity. It’s a Warner Bros. “training short” for the Army (during World War II) but in the public domain. It’s got no IMDb entry, no Google results outside a citation from Doug McClelland’s Eleanor Parker: Woman of a Thousand Faces book… read more
Card Party (1896, Georges Méliès)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 4, 2020
Card Party runs a minute. Three guys sitting outside at a table, drinking wine, playing cards. It’s a family affair for director Méliès (who’s one of the card players), with his brother playing another of them. There aren’t any credits and apparently the third player’s identity is lost to read more
Star Trek: Picard (2020) s01e06 – The Impossible Box
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 3, 2020
This episode… really doesn’t impress. It ought to impress because it finally gets things moving—Picard (Patrick Stewart) heads to the Borg Cube to rescue Soji (Isa Briones). Briones is an android but doesn’t know it. Her lover, Harry Treadaway, knows she’s an android and wants to kill her read more
Stryker’s War (1980, Josh Becker)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 3, 2020
Stryker’s War runs just over forty-five minutes. The first fifteen to twenty minutes are all about how twenty-two year-old lead Bruce Campbell can both do anything and make everything feel legit. The film opens in Vietnam (as shot in East Michigan) with Campbell taking his squad out on a mission af read more
Save Me (2011, Lena Waithe)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 2, 2020
Save Me is the story of a kid (Jaheem Toombs) whose house burned down and the rest of his family died and he goes to ask the man who saved him (Sam Bologna) why he saved him and the man doesn’t tell him so the kid lies about it to his new best friend. There are some ostensible layers to it—Toombs’s read more
Pierre Paolo (1998, Rachel Amodeo)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 1, 2020
Pierre Paolo is a five minute short, set in a seaside Italian town. It opens with a simple, handwritten title card, then there’s a montage of the town set to classical music. The action rests on an old woman (Filomena Paletta) sitting on some stairs. Text appears across the bottom of the frame, exp read more
Becker (1998) s01e16 – Limits & Boundaries
The Stop Button Posted by on Feb 29, 2020
Limits & Boundaries refers to Ted Danson’s uninformed parenting philosophies. The episode opens with him yelling at a woman in the diner (Victoria Kelleher), who is sitting reading a book while her baby cries. Now, she’s not doing anything to get the baby to be quiet, which either is a nineties read more
Weird Melvin (1995) #6
The Stop Button Posted by on Feb 28, 2020
Weird Melvin #6 gives the series a conclusion, but definitely not the one I’d been hoping for. The story title is something like part five, so—for whatever publishing reason—last issue’s fill-ins were really fill-ins. This issue opens with Melvin and the Kid headed back to base with some stolen read more
Cronos (1993, Guillermo del Toro), the U.S. theatrical version
The Stop Button Posted by on Feb 28, 2020
Cronos opens with an English-narrated prologue about a sixteenth century alchemist making a device to prolong his life. The uncredited narrator is wanting, the music isn’t good—it doesn’t seem like the rest of Javier Álvarez’s score, but who knows (well, the distributor would); it’s a change read more
Legends of Tomorrow (2016) s05e06 – Mortal Khanbat
The Stop Button Posted by on Feb 27, 2020
Not sure why Dominic Purcell isn’t in the episode save a scene—he’s still off nursing catching feelings for an ex-girlfriend with lots of beer–but Caity Lotz uses her time off camera to direct this episode. She’s pretty damn good. The episode’s split between a series of John Woo homages read more
Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women’s Fight for Their Rights (2019)
The Stop Button Posted by on Feb 27, 2020
There are a sea of faces in Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists. Sea of faces, sea of names, which is the point. The book is a history of women ignored in history books, though not always. Writer Mikki Kendall doesn’t avoid the awkward subjects, like Susan B. Anthony’s White supremacy or the sign read more
Weird Melvin (1995) #5
The Stop Button Posted by on Feb 26, 2020
Weird Melvin #5 is a flashback issue. Only, not really. There’s clearly some publication history trivia to the series; the cover says this issue has the first two Weird Melvin comics in it, previously unpublished. They present a new origin story for both Melvin and the Kid, who have much different read more
Shadow of the Batgirl (2020)
The Stop Button Posted by on Feb 26, 2020
Shadow of the Batgirl is a bit of a bummer, though I’m not exactly sure why. It’d be nice if it were good. It’s not bad… not if you’re getting it from the library versus spending the sticker price. And there’s a big library subplot in the book so it’s appropriate. It just feels stretched read more
All Rise (2019) s01e16 – My Fair Lockdown
The Stop Button Posted by on Feb 25, 2020
This episode of “All Rise” has this super juicy White man part for guest star Ben Browder. Survivalist holds courtroom hostage; the cops came to kick him out of his home, which is apparently somewhere in the County of Los Angeles but remote enough you don’t see people and no one pays attention read more
Weird Melvin (1995) #4
The Stop Button Posted by on Feb 24, 2020
There is a very good chance Weird Melvin might gross me out next issue. Hansen gets pretty close in the cliffhanger, which features two lady monsters (a mother and daughter) pregnant with half-mutated giant insects, half-monsters. What’s most surprising is the grossness isn’t in Hansen’s detail read more