Oscar who?

A few days ago, a co-worker asked me whether, “as a film buff”, I watch the Oscars, and had I seen all the nominated movies? The answer to both questions is no. Way back in the ’70s I used to watch the Academy Awards shows with a degree of excitement, hoping that something or someone […]

Being Tweeted

Being an old fogey, I haven’t really taken to social media … I still try to communicate through email, though that means I’ve actually lost touch with several people over the past few years as they’ve switched to other methods. But I guess I’ll have to start moving with the times. Since starting this blog, […]

DVD Review: Death Race 3: Inferno

Death Race 3: Inferno, director Roel Reine’s follow-up to his Death Race 2, itself a prequel to Paul W.S. Anderson’s Death Race (2008), picks up where the previous movie ended and ends where the original begins. Carl Lucas (Luke Goss) has been “rebuilt” after his apparent death in a fiery crash, transformed into the masked […]

Additional Recent Viewing …

Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012) I watched Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild just before it landed several Oscar nominations, and my reaction was quite mixed. The film has an impressive visceral power, anchored by the remarkable performance of 5-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy, the determined little girl who lives in […]

Another Titanic footnote

After I posted some old family pictures a while back which showed my father with the Titanic‘s second officer, Commander Lightoller, on a trip to Calais in 1939, I was contacted by Tiphaine Hirou of the French Titanic Society asking for permission to use the photos. I’ve just received a copy of Tiphaine’s interesting article […]

More Recent Viewing

Someone recently posted a comment on one of my reviews for Blogcritics, calling me stupid for not “getting” a movie he’d obviously been obsessing over for a long time. Sometimes, of course, one doesn’t completely understand a movie the first time one sees it (I never could understand Pauline Kael’s assertion that she only needed […]

Blasts from the past

Year End 2011

Jerry Lewis in The Jazz Singer (1959)

Winter 2024 viewing, part three: Other labels

Stanley Kubrick 4B: America in England
Dr. Strangelove (1964)

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