THIS IS WHERE WE CAME IN
The title of this post was once a common expression now lost forever. It had to do with going to the movies, which people did once or twice a week back in the early days of the Sound period. But going to the movies back in the day was a very different experience from that of today. If I want to go see, let's say Spider-Man: Brand New Day (which is currently dominating the box office), I'd probably look it up on Fandango and find a theatre near me that is playing it. No dou
THE VOICES (Part I)
Recently, I assigned a reading from Benjamin Dreyer's delightful examination of English language usage, Dreyer's English, to my AP...
CHRISTMAS MOVIES Part I
More than forty years ago, when I returned from a decade in the Midwest to start teaching in New Jersey, I provided my students a service...
THE MAESTRO OF MOON RIVER
As a lover of music (look how many posts in this blog deal with music!), I like to call attention to luminaries younger music aficionados...
VERTIGO
In 1958, nearing the end of a decade of directing some of his most memorable and deeply profound films, Alfred Hitchcock completed...
THOMAS NEWMAN
Academy Award season is upon us, and I thought I'd pay tribute to someone who has been criminally overlooked for a quarter of a century! ...
GILT-EDGED BONDS
There are many different methods for evaluating the James Bond franchise. Today it is likely that most people who have seen as many as two dozen James Bond films have not read a single Bond book or Bond story by the man who created the character or by those who have tried to maintain that legacy. So whether their first James Bond was Sean Connery or George Lazenby, or Roger Moore, or Timothy Dalton, or Pierce Brosnan, or Daniel Craig, it is more likely that their notion of th
TOP TEN FILMS 2012 POLL
Back in October, I concluded a series of entries on the iconic Sight & Sound Top Ten Films poll, undertaken every decade by the esteemed British film journal. I discussed the changing views of critics over the last sixty years (the first poll was published in 1952). I quibbled about the wrongheaded decision in the 2002 poll to allow The Godfather and The Godfather Part II to be considered a single work (That's just wrong!). I made some tentative predictions (mostly mistaken)
NICK ADAMS-That's How It Is When You're Nineteen!
My students got a big kick out of the just slightly overripe voiceover to this trailer for the 1962 film Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man .
THE AWFUL TRUTH
One of cinema's top ten sight gags-from Leo McCarey's sublime classic comedy of remarriage, The Awful Truth , starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne.
