If you grew up watching (and loving) SCTV as I did, you’ll know what I mean when I say that no matter how much I enjoy Martin Short or John Candy in other movie or TV shows, I find myself wishing that I were watching them in an SCTV skit
The only thing better than docs about old airplanes are old docs about old airplanes…or in this case ‘airships’, the fancy word for ‘Dirigibles’ which was the longer word for ‘blimps’. I haven’t watched this yet so can make no great claims for it, but I can’t imagine it isn’t
Good lord! What was John Huston thinking (or drinking?) when he let loose with this rambling, discursive and largely meaningless five minute diatribe on a late-1970s Oscar broadcast? He certainly sounds magnificent and is, as always, beyond charismatic. I met him in 1981 when I was sixteen years old and
Here’s a quirky little interview with John Huston shot on (or near?) the Irish location of ‘Casino Royal’, the sort-of James Bond movie which he co-directed with twenty other directors. This is ‘portrait of the artist as bullshit-salesman’ deluxe. Huston is charming, evasive, clearly perplexed by what he’s doing involved
Humphrey Bogart called him ‘the monster’ (with great affection, of course). Women found him wildly attractive (even though he treated them rather dreadfully, being proudly ‘multi-amorous’ long before the New York Times wrote admiring articles about threesomes buying and renovation multi-amorous brownstones in Brooklyn). But I digress. John Huston was
In the late 1940s and early 1950s it was generally accepted that Sir Carol Reed, the British filmmaker responsible for ‘The Third Man’, was Europe’s greatest filmmaker. This wasn’t just based on that beyond-classic noir. (Actually placing ‘The Third Man’ in a genre–like noir–is reductive; it’s many different types of
I’ve always hated everything Disney. Hated Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Hated Snow White and Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty. Hated the song ‘It’s A Small World After All’ and especially hated the score to ‘Mary Poppins.’ Worst of all was Disneyland, a theme park I was subjected to several times
Take a look (and read the accompanying explanation) at yesterday’s blog entry. It’s a World War 2 pilot training film ”Learn and Live With Joe Instructor’, absolutely one of the most entertaining war movies ever made. To my dismay, the film ended rather abruptly, halting just as a plane was
Years ago I remember my father recounting to me a training film he and his fellow flight school students were asked (forced) to watch in which Guy Kibbee played an angel who admitted dead student pilots to a special place in heaven/hell, without knowing why. The flight instructor showed up
Filmed in February 1929, when sound was well on its way in, ‘Double Whoopee’ was a defiantly silent entry and one of the best of all Stan and Ollie non-talkies. The hotel setting, characters and costumes are wonderfully evocative of the 20s, complete with ‘The Prince’, a Von Stroheim-esque character