Last night / this morning, I finally saw Skyfall, the 23rd James Bond movie, directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Revolutionary Road), and starring Daniel Craig as Bond, Judi Dench as M, Naomie Harris (28 Days Later, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story) as, uh, Eve, Ben Whishaw (Cloud Atlas, Brideshead Revisited) as Q, and ( Read more... )

Last night (Friday, 9 November) I'd intended to see the new James Bond movie, Skyfall (opening day in the U.S.), but, owing to the number of shithead teenagers and twentysomethings milling about the theatre -- nine of them cut ahead of me in line, and then proceeded to hold up the line while they argued amongst themselves over how they were going ( Read more... )

Yesterday (Tue., 30 Oct.), news that The Walt Disney Company signed a deal to purchase Lucasfilm Ltd. from George Lucas for U.S. $4.05 billion, hit Teh Internets almost as hard as the recently dissipated Hurricane Sandy.

This purchase includes not only the rights to the Star Wars franchise -- Disney plans to resume the original trilogy of ( 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... )

Since my youngest actually liked the original, 1958 movie The Blob -- I took him to see it as part of a Halloween double-feature at an old-timey movie house in the outskirts of Detroit a few years ago; much to my amused disbelief, he preferred it to the 1957 Kurt Neumann-lensed (Neumann directed both the seminal, though dull, first realistic man- ( Read more... )

From Tue., 24 July through Wed., 15 August, I read, thanks to inter-library loan, Michael G. Ankerich's Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels: The Lives, Careers, and Misfortunes of 14 Hard-Luck Girls of the Silent Screen (Duncan, OK: BearManor Media, 2011; ISBN: 978-1-59393-605-1; trade paperback; 405 pps.). The front and back covers are ( Read more... )

Thanks to library (and inter-library) loans, I'm finally starting to see what all the fuss is about over the character John Constantine, the star of his own, apparently still on-going, "mature readers" comic book Hellblazer. I hadn't read any of his comics (or his debut in the Alan Moore-written The Saga of the Swamp Thing) when I saw the vapid ( Read more... )

First we had Gore Vidal's not-unexpected passing last Tuesday, 31 July.

Then we learned of the death, on Thursday, 2 August, of Sir John Keegan, certainly one of, if not the, preeminent military historians of the late 20th century, and one noted for the attention that he paid to the psychological effects of war upon men in works such as 1976's ( Read more... )