At the 96th Academy Awards, Diane Warren failed to win Best Original Song for the fifteenth time in fifteen tries. Shockingly, “The Fire Inside,” written for the movie about the guy who did not in fact come up with the idea for hot Cheetos, did not win. On the other hand, I’m willing to wager… Read More The Warren Index: Will They Win a Competitive Oscar Before Diane Warren?
Terence Davies died and it broke my heart. He was a month shy of his seventy-eighth birthday. In the final decade of his filmmaking career, he made four films: The Deep Blue Sea, Sunset Song, A Quiet Passion, and, all too appropriately, Benediction. With apologies to what he had done from the early 1980s and… Read More Did Terence Davies See Killers of the Flower Moon?
Movie Year Director Actor Actor Ranking The Fly 1986 David Cronenberg Jeff Goldblum Geena Davis 4 Common Threads 1989 Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman 16 Somewhere in Time 1980 Jeannot Szwarc Christopher Reeve Jane Seymour 70 Man Hunt 1941 Fritz Lang Walter Pidgeon Joan Bennett 71 Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1978 Philip Kaufman Donald… Read More Better than AFI’s 100 Passions: Premature Death Cliché
Movie Year Director Actor Actor Ranking They Live by Night 1948 Nicholas Ray Cathy O’Donnell Farley Granger 3 All That Heaven Allows 1955 Douglas Sirk Jane Wyman Rock Hudson 24 Cane River 1982 Horace B. Jenkins Richard Romain Tommye Myrick 54 My Best Girl 1927 Sam Taylor Mary Pickford Charles Rogers 62 The Crimson Kimono… Read More Better than AFI’s 100 Passions: Society Gets in the Way Cliché
Movie Year Director Actor Actor Ranking The Age of Innocence 1993 Martin Scorsese Daniel Day-Lewis Michelle Pfeiffer 2 All This, and Heaven Too 1940 Anatole Litvak Bette Davis Charles Boyer 18 Holiday Affair 1949 Don Hartman Janet Leigh Robert Mitchum 32 The Best Years of Our Lives 1945 William Wyler Dana Andrews Teresa Wright 46… Read More Better than AFI’s 100 Passions: With the Wrong Person (Romantically) Cliché
Movie Year Director Actor Actor Ranking Make Way for Tomorrow 1937 Leo McCarey Beulah Bondi Victor Moore 1 Mississippi Masala 1991 Mira Nair Sarita Choudhury Denzel Washington 9 Claudine 1974 John Berry Diahann Carroll James Earl Jones 60 Lovers and Lollipops 1956 Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin Lori March Gerald S. O’Loughlin 97 Smilin’ Through… Read More Better than AFI’s 100 Passions: The Family Cliché
After the American Film Institute did their initial Top 100 in 1998 (countered twice on this blog, and I’m only linking to one because only one of those projects is non-embarrassing) and their Top 50 movie stars (countered on this blog), they started to move towards genre lists. In 2000, 2001, and 2002 they listed… Read More Better than AFI’s 100 Passions: Introduction and Index
July 1st The place I want to start with Pompeii is its budget, because it’s a blockbuster/spectacle movie and, cynically, I have a hard time starting anywhere else with those. The numbers vary, but let’s call it $90 million in 2014 dollars. My guess is that you are watching pretty close to $90 million on… Read More Movie Diary 2023 (7/1-7/5): Please Stop Making Me Watch Clips from High Society
Okay, two sentences each, let’s make this happen, ready, hike.
Two sentences per movie. The last time I did a retro movie diary, I had three weeks to catch up on. Now I have…more than that. No sweat!
Seeing Things Secondhand 