Last month, we watched the girl play Door #2 at the middle school.A small bit, accentuated with clearing table of the mad tea party.Like all the parents in the theater, my heart was on that stage for three nights. , , Jabberwocky ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!” He took…

John Wayne in The Searchers (1956) Vitals John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, obsessive Confederate Army veteran West Texas and New Mexico Territory, Fall 1868 through 1873 Film: The Searchers Release Date: May 26, 1956 Director: John Ford Costume Designer: Charles Arrico (uncredited) Background Ten days after its Chicago premiere, John Ford’s Western epic The Searchers was released 70 years ago today on May 26, 1956—which coincided with its star John Wayne’s 49th birthday. Successful upon its…

I should warn you that the above very short film could ruin your day in just over a minute. It was really a coincidence that I watched two public information films — Public Service Announcements I believe they’re called in the USA. I watched “Sewing Machine” because I saw it was directed by John Krish, […]

I saw several great reviews of the movie before going to see it, and they were right! Obsession is a movie that makes me feel uncomfortable and at the edge of my seat without falling into your typical horror cliches. Before watching this movie, I dived into the director’s previous work, and I find fascinating how comedy and horror can relate to each other.

Visually, it is a stunning movie. They successfully transported me to the era when the movie takes place. Including the beauty and the grotesque. I wish I had read the book before watching the movie to understand just how much influence the director put on this take of the story. When I started watching it it almost felt like it was going to be a horror movie. I think it fell under the same category as Poor Things, in my opinion. I think the movie is unnecessarily long. The first half of the…

Me outside the Jane Pickens Theatre, which always does amazing promotional posters. Last Thursday night, I had the honor of doing music for 'The General' (1926) for a very appreciative audience at the Jane Pickens Theatre in Newport, R.I.In introducing the film, I tried a new way to explain what an innovator filmmaker Keaton was.I asked everyone to look for a short sequence early in the film when Buster jumps on and starts riding one of those old-fashioned bicycles sometimes called…

When it comes to comparisons, Stephen Fry has certainly been compared to Oscar Wilde any number of times. It didn’t help that he played him in a 1997 film, I suppose. Yet if you are going to be compared to someone, you could do far worse than Wilde. Of course, that wasn’t always the case and here, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery in London, Fry talks about his discovery of Wilde and the connection he feels to the man is obvious – he gets quite emotional at one point in this short. One…

2022 historical thriller, seventh of its series. A Missing Heir has shown up. Well, maybe. Veronica knew the real man back in the day, and is asked to see if she recognises him…

The Stanley Kramer comedy classic film It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (United Artists, 1963) has a handful of Royal KMG typewriters featured in the office settings at police stations throughout the film. The KMG was Royal’s top-of-the-line office standard machine and was manufactured from 1949 to 1952 before being replaced by the Royal HH (1952 to 1957) and the Royal FP (1957to 1962). By the time the film premiered in November of 1963, the newest desktop manual would have been the Royal…

Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl (2003)

Top Chef Carolinas episode 12 had a shocking ending, and I'm not talking about the scene from Anaconda where a massive snake leapt out of the woods and attacked the chefs and judges.

I ran across two short films on Kanopy that Alfred Hitchcock made in 1944: Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache. They were meant to serve as British propaganda, but their Hitchcockian ambiguity led officials in the Ministry of Information to shelve them. They weren’t released for some fifty years.

The films of Maria Lassnig are worth their weight in the sediment of their unearthing. Even in moments of deliberate construction, they carry the scars of something recovered beyond psychic awareness, arising from the muscular ache preceding perception. Throughout this timely volume, one senses an artist trying to place consciousness under physical pressure until it reveals its own anatomy. The result is not simply a supplementary chapter to her endeavors as a painter but an adjacent nervous…

Evidently, the climactic stunt at the end of Police Story — where Jackie Chan as Chan Ka-kui leaps from an upper-floor balcony in a mall and slides down a light fixture to the ground floor — had already become legendary by the time they were making the sequel. I know this because in one of the beginning scenes of Police Story 2, Ka-kui’s supervisors are dressing him down for how much money the finale of the last movie cost the city government. “Uncle” Bill scolds him, “Why not take the stairs?”…

In Part 4 of Twin Peaks: The Return, Dougie Jones has a moment of self-reflection in his bathroom mirror following a great release. For years, I’ve wondered what framed floral image was hanging on the bathroom wall as Dougie approached the mirror. It didn’t take long for me to locate the original artwork first created in... The post Twin Peaks Prop – Clematis Artwork by Louise-Cécile Descamps-Sabouret in Dougie Jones’ Bathroom appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

Din Djarin, famed as "The Mandalorian," and his diminutive ward Grogu are working for the New Republic, bringing down Imperial warlords and war criminals in the lawless Outer Rim. His latest commission sees him reluctantly working with the Hutts to rescue the lost son of Jabba the Hutt so he can get information on an Imperial fugitive. Several reversals of fortune see Djarin with a bounty on his head from the most powerful crime lords in the galaxy.The Mandalorian & Grogu is the first Star Wars…

⚠️ **SPOILER WARNING:** MILD SPOILERS Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War (2026) brings intense espionage and action as Jack Ryan and his team navigate a deadly covert conflict in a high-stakes battle for global security. **My Rating:**... ⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: MILD SPOILERS Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War (2026) brings intense espionage and action as Jack Ryan and his team navigate a deadly covert conflict in a high-stakes battle for global security. My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐½ (3.5/5 stars) I agree with…

The 1957 Disney Zorro series draws a lot of inspiration from incarnations I covered in my previous posts. The first season consists of three loosely serialized 13-episode arcs in the spirit of the Republic serials, and the show’s composer, William Lava, previously scored Zorro’s Fighting Legion. William Witney, co-director of the first two serials, directs multiple episodes of season 2 and the first two of the subsequent hourlong specials. And George J. Lewis, the male lead from Zorro’s Black…

IDW’s Crime Sampler (2026) arranges upcoming comics on classic string boards. ▲ IDW Crime Sampler (2026), rear cover ▲ IDW Crime Sampler (2026), cover ▲ IDW Crime Sampler (2026)

Frock Flicks is off for this American holiday. If you need a Frock Flicks fix,

The matinee movie on KRON is one that should bring a smile to any fan of the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team: Zero Hour!, the movie that served as the model for Airplane! Dana Andrews stars as Ted Stryker, the ex-fighter pilot haunted by guilt who's called on to land a passenger airlineer after the crew becomes sick from eating bad fish; Linda Darnell is his wife, who's preparing to leave him because of his inability to pull his life back together; and Sterling Hayden is Captain Treleaven,…

It’s no secret that the Hollywood Comet loves musicals. In 2010, I revealed I had seen 400 movie musicals over the course of eight years. Now that number is over 600. To celebrate and share this musical love, here is … Continue reading →

The Barbican has set itself quite a high bar with is annual summer musical, a feature that began in the aftermath of the pandemic as a recovery project, luring Sutton Foster from Broadway to star alongside Robert Lindsay and Felicity Kendal in Anything Goes a ship-sized production so acclaimed it returned the subsequent year. Then […]

I like to run this post on Memorial Day (one version first ran May 28, 2012) because when I think about soldiers and wars and Memorial Day, I think about Uncle Bundy. He was awfully opinionated and excessively direct but I admired him greatly and listened when he talked. Not he ever talked about the war, he didn’t. But in this case, what he was talking about is an ancient link between war, technology, and humans — a link began when someone first improved a stone into both the first hammer and…

When I saw Supercop when it was released in the US in 1996, I was already madly in love with it before the credits even stopped rolling. It was fun, twisty, unabashedly silly, and started my weird crush on Michelle Yeoh (then credited as Michelle Khan), who was doing some of the most amazing stunts I’d ever seen, and she didn’t even have top billing. I didn’t learn until later that it was actually the third in the Police Story series, which was already well known in Asia and by lovers of Hong…

In the annals of post-talk-show-cancellation stunts, Stephen Colbert hosting an hour-long episode of a Michigan public access show might be my new favorite. Jack White serves as the “volunteer musical director,” playing the perfect straight man to Colbert’s silly schtick and the episode is full of other great cameos that I won’t spoil here. The whole episode is charming, chaotic, and incredibly fun to watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJTXB5uT_C4 I’m excited to see whatever Stephen does…

24 in 24: Last Chef Standing's first two winners were guest judges in season 3 episode 6, and neither has slept since then so it was time for the zombie challenge!! Wait, I think I'm as tired as the chefs.

The old protect the young, then the young protect the old. This is the way. — The Mandalorian and Grogu

I like Luigi Maggi’s earlies. He had an epic sensibility and he was attracted to subjects like THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII (1911) and NERO (1909) but his epics were approx ten minutes long. I haven’t seen much of his later films, when running times were more extravagant. But this one is more of a […]