Finally watched Zeitgeist: The Movie (2007) via Netflix; it had been recommended to me a few years ago by a co-worker from Eastern Europe who, while not normally beholden to conspiracy theories, has enough ethnic, national and religious hatreds (to wit: Roma -- whom he refuses to dignify by that name; he insists on calling them "gypsies" -- ( Read more... )

Last night / this morning, I watched Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter (2011), starring Michael Shannon (soon to be the subject of much fanboy scrutiny due to his role as General Zod in the forthcoming Stalin bio-pic Superman movie, Man of Steel; although he's also made an impression in HBO's Boardwalk Empire as a profoundly disturbed Treasury agent, and ( Read more... )

(With apologies to Rick Springfield.)

Just finished watching the second season of 24 on DVD; owing to, oh, many different factors, I never watched the show when it was on, but I sure heard and read about much of the kerfuffle over it, chiefly over the frequent use -- and efficacy -- of torture, but also over the fact that Los Angeles gets nuked ( Read more... )

Finally finished watching Season One of Dexter, the still-running Showtime TV series about a "righteous" serial killer (played by Michael C. Hall) who works as a blood spatter analyst for the Miami police department by day and targets other serial killers by night ( Read more... )

I recently watched The Shuttered Room (1967), an adaptation of the eponymous short story by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth (I believe it was a posthumous collaboration); also on the DVD was the 1966 misfire It!, a shoulda-been-better movie about the Golem. (It! should've been better because it was produced, written and directed by the guy who ( Read more... )

When one of my co-workers deigns to chit-chat with me, he can sometimes say something that will really make me scratch my head in bafflement ( Read more... )

Finally saw Detour (1945), a short (68 mins.), much-celebrated film noir directed by Edgar Ulmer about a dim (dim, I tell you!) would-be concert pianist who, after exercising some very poor judgment when a shady good Samaritan perishes after helping him, falls into the clutches of an abrasive (and, apparently, alcoholic) femme fatale ( Read more... )

I recently noted my interest in movies about blobs, and my intention to rectify a gap in my movie-watching history by using Netflix to rent the sequel to the 1958 movie The Blob, the 1972 (though the small text at the bottom of the title says 1971 in Roman numerals) movie alternately titled Beware! The Blob, Beware the Blob, Son of Blob and The ( Read more... )

On the commentary track to Magnum Force (1973), the second of the five Dirty Harry movies starring Clint Eastwood, the co-screenwriter, John Milius (who also co-wrote, uncredited, the screenplay for the first movie in the series, Dirty Harry [1971]), said that the scenes of the two women throwing themselves (separately, mind you) at Harry Callahan ( Read more... )

A couple of thoughts that aren't exactly "senses-shattering" (as many a blurb on a Marvel Comics cover in the 1960s and 1970s would have it) that occurred to me this weekend:

• After watching the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force -- this is the one with (SPOILERS!) the execution squad on the police department being secretly run by the ( Read more... )