“In Jailhouse Rock, he was everything Rockabilly’s about. I mean he was mean, surly, nasty, rude. In that movie he didn’t give a fuck about nothing except Rocking and Rolling, living fast, dying young, and leaving a good looking corpse. Y’know, I watch that hillbilly, I want to be him so bad. . . Elvis …
“I’m not angry sister. I’m fucking desperate.” It’s pretty hard not to be fascinated by the Beatle’s Hamburg, Germany period. Lore would have it that it was sort of a wild untamed boot camp that eventually forged a bunch of kids into a Rock and Roll band. It must have been a great time to …
A Hard Day’s Night begins with the startling crisp ring of a sustained Gsus4th chord struck from George Harrison’s brand new Rickenbacker 360 12 string guitar, only the second one ever made, the most famous chord in the history of pop music. An atomic bomb might as well have gone off. From that point on …
“Kids, you should never kill a man unless it’s absolutely necessary” Everyone should get to be the hero of their very own Frank Capra movie. This is Clint Eastwood’s, and it’s a fine melting pot of You Can’t Take It With You, It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, with a little bit …
“He’s right I’m stupid and I like it.” I always sort of wondered exactly what the appeal of the dumb hot blonde was in the history of film and TV. I wonder if anyone really ever enjoyed it or if it was really just a terrorist action by all the successful crafty folk who hated them …
Back in the day, just before Seinfeld mania hit the country I was watching Jack Lemmon in Mister Roberts. He plays a lazy, fast talking, pretty boy, cowardly, skirt chasing loon named Ensign Frank Pulver. Pulver has been on the US cargo ship Reluctant for 14 months, all the while avoiding the notice of the …
“Dad used to say the only causes worth fighting for were the lost causes.” Remember back in the old days when there were only about six television channels and you’d marvel at your middle of the night good fortune to find a great old movie on worth watching. I could never turn my back on …
Jean Arthur was Frank Capra’s secret weapon. Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart had all the bravado moves, but Arthur was the key to convincing the audience that these wholesome, ordinary men of truth and soul were not only not worth mocking by the cruelly cynical and cold modern world, they were the key to shedding …
“It’s not a rip off it’s an homage.” What a weird artifact of the late ‘80s this is. Dirty Harry as graying pissed off pulp super hero. By this time, Clint was making Dirty Harry movies merely to pay for his artier film experiments that would eventually lead to his climactic career masterwork Unforgiven. I imagine …
Boy did Ronald Reagan love this movie! He should have because after all he was the nation’s cheerleader for the right wing movement that made Harry fashionable again. It’s always been my contention that Communist Russia fell because of their growing fascination with American Pop Culture, but I can’t really argue with anyone who traces …
“Well that’s very stylish.” Harry Callahan’s thoughts on women in the police force. How does this guy still have a job? The only people he treats as rudely as the street vermin he dispels with are his direct superiors. Here he sort of saves the Mayor of San Francisco, but the way he glares at the …
“I didn’t shoot at anyone who didn’t start shooting at me first.” Man there must have been a ton of crime in San Francisco in the ‘70s. This is a movie that anticipated the narrowing of the attention span. Forget for a moment that there are four traffic cops blowing away every mob boss and pink …
In which, Clint Eastwood gives us the morally ambiguous cop for which every red blooded white American male had always been longing. Hero as stalking killing machine. Eastwood’s neo fascist Dirty Harry was controversial in 1971, but today he seems to be the rule at least in the world of movies. Even the most liberal …
I’ve come to love reading history, but you have to admit that it’s gotten to be pretty bleak territory these days. Today I decided that maybe we’ve gone too far when I saw the following headline in the USA Today Travel section, “10 Great places to absorb the reality of slavery.” Wow. Are they just giving …
Warning: Superbad is rated R for surprisingly everything under the sun except nudity(!) and people who don’t remember what it was like to be 17 should avoid this movie like the plague. Superbad is everything your parents warned you about that you did anyway. I have long bemoaned the fact that the Citizen Kane of teenage sex …
