Kinsey: Special Edition
November 13, 2005
From the late ‘30s to the mid ‘50s, Dr. Alfred Kinsey changed the way people thought and talked about sex. He dared to speak frankly and openly about sex at an extremely repressive time. Kinsey was a pioneer and an innovator, someone who was a free...
Richard Pryor Stand-Up Comedy Double Feature
November 13, 2005
It’s safe to say that without Richard Pryor there would be no Chris Rock or Dave Chappelle—comedians who mine a lot of the same territory that Pryor had already covered in the 1970s. I was never a big fan of his feature films. They always seemed to...
Hoop Dreams
November 12, 2005
For every Allen Iverson or Shaquille O’Neal that makes it to fame and fortune in the NBA, there are hundreds who don’t. Hoop Dreams (1994) is a documentary that follows two Chicago inner-city boys from their freshman year in high school to their freshman...
The Last Shot
November 12, 2005
Actors love doing satires of Hollywood. Case in point: the movie star-packed cast of Robert Altman’s movie The Player (1992) and David Mamet’s State and Main (2000). The Last Shot (2004) follows in this tradition but as you’re watching this clumsy...
The Phantom of the Opera
November 12, 2005
It’s amazing that it took this long for a film version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s famous Broadway musical The Phantom of the Opera to be made. While it was seen by millions upon millions of people worldwide, the movie failed to draw in the big numbers...
Sin City
November 12, 2005
Sin City began as series of graphic novels created by Frank Miller. They are loving homages to the gritty pulp novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane and classic film noirs from the ‘40s and ‘50s. Miller’s world—the dangerous,...
Steve McQueen Collection
November 11, 2005
The one word that is always used to describe actor Steve McQueen is cool. He was the essence of cool. The movies he made were always considered the epitome of cool. He was a hard working, hard playing rebel who had the kind of dangerous charisma that...
Forty Guns
November 10, 2005
Hell and High Water (1954) was one of 20th Century Fox’s earliest experiments with CinemaScope, widescreen movies that were Hollywood’s attempt to lure people away from their TV sets and back into the theatres by giving them something they couldn’t...
Law & Order: Season 3
November 10, 2005
In some respects there’d be no Law and Order without the films of Sidney Lumet—specifically the ones about police corruption and the compromises that cops and lawyers are sometimes forced to make. These themes are the foundation for Dick Wolf’s...
The Godfather Part III
November 9, 2005
Why? This is the question that many people asked themselves before and after seeing Francis Ford Coppola’s third (and hopefully last) installment of The Godfather saga. The first two parts were such perfect meditations on violence and the absolute corrupting...
