This weekend we watched Fritz Lang’s classic crime drama ‘M’, starring Peter Lorre as a child molester/murderer. The film is still shocking. Cinematically it’s filled with technical achievements years ahead of the times. Dramatically it’s perverse, scary and ultimately moving in a quite horrific way. Click here to read more
Robert Shaw is probably best known for his roles in ‘Jaws’, ‘The Sting’ and as Henry the 8th in ‘A Man For All Seasons.’ But he was also a fine writer–his play (and later film) ‘The Man In The Glass Booth’ is a compelling and quite provocative study of an
In 1941 my father was an Army Air Corps grunt who was enlisted for flight training in the event a war were to occur (it was still several months prior to December 7, but as he used to tell me ‘the war was in the air’). There were three training
For the past couple of years I’ve been comparing where we currently are with Artificial Intelligence with where we were in 1994-1995 with the internet; alternately impressed and scared, dismissive and fascinated, eager to figure out how to use it to give us some kind of advantage we never thought
As humor goes, blooper reels are set at a pretty low bar. Hearing actors screw up and punctuate things with a tasty expletive gets old fast. So why am I posting a 14 minute reel of Warner Brothers contract actors blowing their lines from films made in 1939? Because it’s
Ronald Neame was a distinguished English cinematographer who worked with David Lean on their earliest films–‘Great Expectations’, ‘The Happy Breed’, ‘Oliver Twist’ etc. He then moved into directing and had a relatively good–if perhaps a bit spotty–run, directing a diverse set of films which included ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ (which he
Several years ago I produced and hosted a podcast featuring conversations between me and many legendary filmmakers. Among the guests were Mel Brooks, Andy Garcia, Peter Bogdanovich, Randal Kleiser, John Sayles, Mary Harron, John Avildsen…you get the idea. I stopped doing it because, frankly, I ran out of people I
At the peak of the Marx Brothers revival of the late 60s–mid 70s, an LP consisting of snippets of Marx Brothers routines was released and became my favorite record of all time…at least during the summer of 1974. The record is narrated by Garry Owens, an announcer who was a
Venice Beach, California, has always been a home for freaks. It was built for freakish reasons–to resemble Venice, Italy which it doesn’t at all–and was captured on film by freaky genius filmmakers; Orson Welles used it to sub for Tiajuana in ‘Touch of Evil’, Charlie Chaplin filmed ‘Kid Auto Races
Formation flying is an exacting and treacherous art–it’s still done and it’s still beautiful to behold, but it’s now greatly aided by technological communication. In the earliest days, however, there were no Bose headsets or radio transmission between pilots to be had, so the entire feat was accomplished using hand