“He looks like that fella in the movies, Ralph Bellamy:” It’s a drag to be Ralph Bellamy. Sure you get to be in movies, you’re sort of a movie star, but you’re only there to lose the girl to Cary Grant. You’re a great guy, you’re probably very successful, you may indeed be the nicest …
Eddie Wilson: I want something great, I want something that nobody’s ever done before. Sal Amato: Why? We ain’t great, we’re just some guys from Jersey. Eddie Wilson: If we can’t be great, then there’s no sense in ever playing music again. I have a bit of a soft spot for this movie. I actually …
“All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If he didn’t want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire and lust in my body and then deny me the talent?” This is one hell of a bad …
There is nothing wrong with grade A prime aged Angus beef, but sometimes all you really want is a McDonald’s hamburger. Major League is the quarter pounder with cheese of baseball movies. There’s nothing original about it, all the characters are stolen from other books or movies, but it understands the longings of a starved …
This was probably supposed to be a feminist manifesto, but the men steal the picture. Jon Lovitz plays the wonderfully weasely Baseball Scout Ernie Capadino, and gets nothing to do nothing but spit out fabulously cynical one liners. Tom Hanks, in the first successful mature role of his career, as the hard drinking, embarassed to …
It’s hard to believe now that baseball players were ever underpaid and mistreated, but in the early part of the century players took what they were offered, played where they were told, or they found another profession. The 1919 Chicago White Sox were widely considered to be the greatest baseball team of all time. They …
There’s a 1949 movie starring Ray Milland called It Happen’s Every Spring. Milland plays a college professor, who invents a concoction of some sort that when applied to a substance causes that substance to be repelled by wood. I’m not exactly sure what Jonas Salk would have done with that discovery, but I’m pretty sure …
Archie Bunker probably would have never suspected that his meathead son in law would become such a great director, but from his classic debut Spinal Tap until he made the big money mistake that was North, Rob Reiner was about as close to automatic as they come. His Harry Met Sally was an intelligent and …
Apparently, Clark Gable didn’t want to make this movie, and was loaned out to Columbia as a punishment by MGM for being too headstrong and demanding. If Burt Reynolds had been working in 1934 he probably would have turned it down too. The picture became the first movie ever to win all five major Academy …
“This is my Gun, Clyde!” The cool thing about “The Gauntlet” is the overkill. What “The Blues Brothers” was to smashing police cars, “The Gauntlet” is to fired artillery. Here Clint comes the closest he ever came to portraying a real life policeman. He plays Ben Shockley, who is a dim witted …
Something Wild is Jonathon Demme’s punked out version of It Happened One Night on speed with a twist. Usually in these affairs the male lead is a bit of a loose end that needs to be tamed, while the woman is almost always some cold repressed version of your high school English teacher with potential. …
Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald) is walking through a living nightmare. Her sister is about to marry an uncouth Italian hood, both sets of Grandparents have invaded her house, and in all the insanity surrounding the wedding everyone has forgotten her sixteenth birthday. Sixteen Candles was the first effort by writer director John Hughes on his …
In the aftermath of the Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris Columbine disaster, a clueless news reporter desperately trying to understand the un-understandable came forward with the shocking opinion that “apparently there were cliques in this school.” Cliques in high school? You think? The Breakfast Club was teen-auteur John Hughes’ attempt to take a step back …
The third and final chapter in the John Hughes Molly Ringwald trilogy takes the premise of Sixteen Candles, and raises the stakes a bit. What if the geek that was in love with her happened to be her best friend, and what if her fairy tale boyfriend’s rich friends didn’t appreciate their mature and understanding …
I missed 52 days of school my senior year so I knew immediately where Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was coming from. In fact, if I could have pulled a chick like Mia Sara in high school this film would have been about me. This is John Hughes’ best teen film, and it’s a call to …
