Dirty Harry’s Place…

A new meme’s caught up to me via my buddy Robert Avrech and Mr. Loophole over at The Shelf.

And away we go…

1. Barbara Stanwyck: Number one for no reason more complicated than the fact that I’m desperately in love with her.

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2. Judy Garland: Because there will never be another. Not even close. Continue Reading »

Here, edited a touch, is my review from May of 2007. Re-reading and reliving just what a diseased thing The Good German is, I’m not at all surprised its creator, Steven Soderbergh, has moved on to exalting a mass-murderer like Che. Not surprised at all.

THE GOOD GERMAN

The sound design isn’t bad. There, I promised myself I would start with something positive. Wait there’s more: Cate Blanchett makes it out unscathed.

Am I gushing too much?

Oh, brother, what a disaster. And I’m certainly not alone in thinking that. Produced for an estimated $35 million, this bomb barely cleared $5 million worldwide despite the presence of two fellas Hollywood and its media minions swear are box office draws: George Clooney and Tobey Maguire. But The Good German fails on more than just the financial front, it fails on every front (I was kidding about the sound design and Blanchett). Continue Reading »

There aren’t many films that transcend their art, and time, and generations. A box-office disappointment when released, It’s A Wonderful Life was so forgotten its copyright lapsed causing it to be looped endlessly on small independent television stations everywhere desperate for free programming. Inevitably it was rediscovered by a new generation. A generation under siege by a film industry that now scoffs at such simplistic ideas as reminding us of the rich benefits which can be reaped by our own simple human decency.

Fifteen-years ago it was all the rage to worship It’s A Wonderful Life, and then the inevitable backlash began by the contrary-is-cool crowd and those offended by spiritualism and sentiment. Whatever. All I know is that after dozens of viewings each new one is like the first and without fail the story stays with me for days. 

And who are we to argue with time? Like Beethoven and Sinatra, It’s A Wonderful Life will live for as long as there’s a civilization with the technology to enjoy it. Because the message is about the simplest and yet most important of things. It’s about why, when things seem to be at their worst, we must then take a step outside the hurly burly of life’s disappointments to inventory our blessings.  Continue Reading »

Dirty Harry’s Place is officially and permanently closed for business.

Dirty Harry aka John Nolte can be found over at Big Hollywood.

Please sends tips and correspondence through the Big Hollywood contact page.

Revolutionary Road opens its story just after the conclusion of a disastrous community theatre production of The Petrified Forest where, on a small, suburban public school stage, April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) has suffered more than just humiliation, her self image as a unique individual with a special place in the world has been destroyed. Her husband, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), obviously tired of April’s latest attempt at self-actualization, isn’t exactly sympathetic. The argument that follows is bitter, the film that follows is probably worse than that play.

What say we don’t argue over whether or not the suburbs, especially the suburbs of the 1950s, are killers of the human spirit. To each their own, right? But does anyone really want to defend that portraying the suburbs as such hasn’t become the most tiring of tiring cliches? Almost as tiring as the mentally unbalanced character with a unique, penetrating insight into the human condition … which Revolutionary Road also employs.

Years ago, when April and Frank first met, they were not yet twenty-five, had their whole lives ahead of them and were positive they were special. She was studying to be an actress and he was a longshoreman dreaming of a life lived in Paris. Like all of us, things didn’t quite turn out as planned. For instance, I don’t drive a choo choo train and go home to a fur bikini holding Raquel Welch. The difference between by myself and the Wheelers, though, is that I grew up.

Continue Reading »

Hollywood Values when it comes to a 36 year-old woman having sex with a 15 year-old boy:

I’m so sorry, “statutory rape”? I’ve got to tell you, I’m so offended by that. No, I really am. I genuinely am. To me, that is absolutely not this story at all. That boy knows exactly what he’s doing. For a start, Hanna Schmitz thinks that he’s seventeen, not fifteen, you know? She’s not doing anything wrong.

That offends her. A script that gets her naked with a 17 year-old actor, not so much.

At first the whole story about her character having sex with a young boy confused me. Isn’t Leo like 19 now?

Nearly two and a half hours pass before The Curious Case of Benjamin Button hits you with any real warmth or poignancy and that’s an awfully long row to hoe in order to finally feel the way the lush trailer promised. The real failure of the film isn’t due to its frustrating lack of a central story and emotional through-line, or even two very unappealing love interests. It fails because wistful isn’t a theme, and other than a series of episodes under the impression they’re more important than they really are, Benjamin Button simply isn’t about anything. 

Benjamin (Brad Pitt) is born the size of a baby but the rest of him is an old man in his eighties riddled with arthritis, cataracts and wrinkled skin. His mother dies during child birth leaving his father emotionally devastated and in no condition to deal with his seemingly deformed son. He leaves the baby at the doorstep of an old folks home run by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) who, under the belief the child will die soon, takes little Benjamin under her protective wing. Benjamin doesn’t die, though. Instead he grows younger and younger with each passing year.  

Benjamin’s mind is still that of a child’s, so he learns to read and write like any toddler must. And while he’s smallish like a child, in every other respect he’s an old man in need of eyeglasses and a wheelchair. Eventually, over the years as he grows younger, he will grow into the fine physical specimen we call Brad Pitt.

Continue Reading »

As documented here, here, and here, through the portrayal of the sympathetic child molester, the onscreen hyper-sexualization of young girls, and child characters liberated through sexual behavior, for a number of years now the film industry has waged a drip-drip campaign in favor of the normalization of sex between adults and underage children. The offensive is a quiet, insidious one slowly slithering into the mainstream, and like all Leftist movements, will not stop until it gets what it wants.

The most recent drip on this wicked front comes from the well-reviewed Doubt, which might just earn an Oscar nomination for a “daring” use of nuance when it comes to what decent people call “the rape of a child.”

Continue Reading »

Isn’t any film with a turkey that doesn’t stop its story dead to lament our whipping of Indian butt a pretty conservative one? Thanksgiving is by its very nature a conservative holiday because it celebrates the last day of the Utopia that was North America before Western European Whitey began our rape and plunder. Because as we all know this land was without sin before we arrived. Indians didn’t own slaves. Indians didn’t damage the environment. Indians didn’t start wars or steal land.

So, this is a fairly easy list to compile because Thanksgiving’s a holiday that celebrates the seeds of a very successful act of my kind of imperialism … Western Imperialism.  

1. The Ice Storm (1997)

(Deep breath…) Okay, this is how it works: In the 1960’s the best fed, best housed, most ungrateful and spoiled generation ever didn’t want a bunch of non-white, non-Christians in Vietnam to share the freedoms they enjoyed… So, they turned on their parents, turned on their country, ignored the noble civil rights movement, and became the hippie generation whose legacy is AIDS, drug abuse, and unwed mothers. The hippies told us they were protesting the war on moral grounds and yet the protests stopped when the draft did. Hmm? So, as the war raged on, the hippies became yuppies, embraced materialism in excess of anything their bourgeois parents ever imagined, moved to the suburbs, and clung to their self-destructive free-love-entitlement lifestyle at the expense of their kids. (Exhale.)  And The Ice Storm is a damning indictment of that generation, that thankfully uses Thanksgiving somewhere along the way allowing me the pretense to get the above off my chest. Continue Reading »

Donald Westlake was the prolific author behind some brilliant cinema pulp. We’re talking about small, smart, memorable films — too many of which are not available on DVD, including The Stepfather and The Outfit.

From Westlake’s novel “The Hunter,” came John Boorman’s brilliant Point Blank (1967), a study in the relentless summed up by an unforgettable shot of Walker (Lee Marvin) making his determined way down a long airport terminal. The story was simple. Walker, a low-level thug betrayed and left for dead, wants back the money stolen from him; not a penny more, not a penny less — and he’ll kill his way through the hierarchy of the mob to get it. Filling his simple concept with a treasure of emotional complications and details surrounding mob life, Westlake gives us the unflinching anti-hero who’s more watchable than sympathetic thanks to a skewed, fascinating, personal code of honor. The novel was somewhat successfully remade as Payback in 1999 with Mel Gibson, but from the opening scene the remake undermines itself straining for anti-heroism. If Payback served any purpose it was in bringing people to Point Blank. Continue Reading »

Worst lists are somewhat disingenuous. The truly worst films of the year are always the cheapie slasher flicks and pretentious independent films Blockbuster only buys a single copy of. But my definition of worst is “worst experience,” as in crushing disappointment, as in There’s A Special Place In Hell For All Involved And We Call It “The George Lucas Wing.”

So are the films on my list really the worst of the year? Worse than The Eye or the remake of Prom Night? Probably not. But those films are what they are. Mine is a list of soul eaters and hack jobs. Mine is a list that makes you rethink your love of the medium and wonder why you would ever plunk down ten-bucks again. These are films that should be unspooled, turned into nooses, and all involved in the making of them hanged on pay-per-view… Continue Reading »

Den Of Geek:

However, in recent years, there’s been an increasing trend towards, what seems to me, a bit of madness in the editing suite.

I first noticed it, or it was at its most obvious, in Michael Bay’s Transformers movie (and I say this as someone who likes many of his films). That’s perhaps the first film I’ve seen that’s ever made me feel old. Because while the effects were stunning, the build up was good and the idea of seeing big mechanical constructs whacking seven shades of shit out of each other was utterly endearing, I got to a point where I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Genuinely: none whatsoever. Continue Reading »

Besides pure entertainment value, what makes A Christmas Story exceptional is that there’s no other film like it. Others have tried, including an ill-conceived sequel, but none  comes close. A Christmas Story is lightening in a bottle. A nostalgic look back at childhood perfectly pitched ten-degrees off center that manages to be all things wistful, absurd, abstract, and heartwarming. Whether done intentionally or by accident, A Christmas Story is a rare thing that stands alone.

Jean Shepard, the film’s wonderful narrator, is also responsible for the collection of short stories on which the movie’s based.  In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash is a series of anecdotes told from the perspective of an adult Ralphie going back to his hometown and reminiscing with people he hasn’t seen in decades. The cobbling together of a script from these stories to create the solid narrative of the film is quite a feat in itself, but it’s Shepard’s unique voice that drives the book and it was director Bob Clark’s genius to capture that voice, both literally and figuratively, on film. Continue Reading »

It looks as though Al Franken won the Minnesota recount. Norm Coleman still has legal options available to him but at least from a personal standpoint I’m satisfied the recount was as accurate as you could hope for and that Franken’s the legitimate winner.

Coleman should give it up and let the comedy begin.

Ugh.

I was sure it was my high-def television, which I grabbed for a pretty good deal at Circuit City, but the over the past few weeks the mystery has deepened as I’ve noticed something.

My older DVDs look great. Both black & white and color films all have rich contrasts, bright color, sharp details – the picture is splendid. Newer films, however, are dark and washed out. Yesterday I screened Where Eagles Dare and was blown away by how vivid the picture was. Right after, though, I screened Master and Commander and it looked terrible. Almost blurry. The picture wasn’t sharp, the details were fuzzy, and everything had a washed out quality as though the contrast was set too high. No amount of fiddling corrected this.

That’s just one example, but it’s something I’m running into again and again.

There are exceptions, but how frustrating that my ten-year-old bare bones copy of Grumpy Old Men has a sharper picture than National Treasure.

To the best of my ability above, I’ve documented the difference, though the bottom photo should appear a little more washed out.

Any ideas?

The ground war has begun. Israel dropped fliers warning people to leave, which means I’ll pray for peace right around the time IDF soldiers are painting parking lines all over Gaza.

The bottom line:

So it is Israel Alone, fighting the good fight against religious totalitarianism, misogyny, homophobia, global Sharia… I could go on, but Israel’s enemies are not going to believe me anyway.  They have their brains filtered through Annie Lennox - like taking you College Boards on LSD.  The singer is leading anti-Israel marches through London. [Didn’t Lennox once have a bad divorce from an Israeli guy?-ed. I didn’t know that.  Perhaps the New York Times will check it out for us.]

But what’s interesting about these marches - and the demonstrations inside Israel by Arab Israelis - is that they are not all that well attended, barely in the tens of thousands.  Many of us old Vietnam protestors remembers hundreds of thousands.  Does that mean something?  Most certainly they will build, but how much?  And what does this mean?  Do Israel’s enemies - some of them anyway - suffer from moral confusion?  How does a liberal or a leftist justify supporting a regime of religious fanatics whose ideology, when examined, is in complete contra-distinction to everything they claim they stand for?

Who’s in favor of a “disproportionate” amount of parking space where Annie Lennox lives?

Via Esquire, we learn Clint is no navel gazer:

I don’t know if I can tell you exactly when the pussy generation started. Maybe when people started asking about the meaning of life. …

You wonder sometimes. What will we do if something really big happens? Look how fast — seven years — people have been able to forget 9/11. Maybe you remember if you lost a relative or a loved one. But the public can get pretty blasé about stuff like that. Nobody got blasé about Pearl Harbor.

You start right around 1967 and call the whole stinkin’ bunch: Generation P.

Thanks to Tattoo for the link.

Oh, I tried and I tried and I tried and I tried, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t come close to saying it better than Ace.

UPDATE: Reading the comments, I’m shocked at the intolerance. All Ayers did was blow up buildings, attempt mass murder, and organize a revolution to overthrow democracy.

You people act like he donated money to pass Prop. 8, or something…

Look to the Left for the targets of your outrage. They’ll show us way!

Steve Mason has all the weekend numbers over at Big Hollywood. Must say, the success of Marley & Me is a shocker. It barely registered with me in trailers that came off as a big pile of nothing special filmed like a television movie. It will hit $100 million in 8 days. This is why you never hear box office predictions from me.

1. Marley & Me - $24.7M, $7,047 PTA, $107.16M cume
2. Bedtime Stories - $22M, $5,972 PTA, $87.1M cume
3. Benjamin Button - $18.1M, $6,058 PTA, $78.75M cume
4. Valkyrie - $14M, $5,040 PTA, $60.65M cume
5. Yes Man - $13.9M, $4,048 PTA, $79.37M cume
6. Seven Pounds - $10.96M, $3,976 PTA, $61M cume
7. Tale of Despereaux - $8.1M, $2,621 PTA, $44.87M cume
8. The Day the Earth Stood Still - $5.92M, $2,534 PTA, $75.37M cume
9. Doubt - $5.22M, $4,056 PTA, $18.93M cume
10. Slumdog Millionaire - $4.29M, $7,015 PTA $28.3M cume

Doubt, Slumdog Millionaire, and Milk are already box office hits, Frost/Nixon and The Reader are both fizzling, Gran Torino will probably break out when it opens wide, The Wrestler and Revolutionary Road could go either way as they expand.

John Travolta and Kelly Preston lost their 16-year-old son Jett today. Much more here.

Keep the family in your prayers.

Here’s hoping that through an overnight ground assault we see a “disproportionate” amount of terrorist-snuffing, appeaser-whining and liberal media outrage while Israel does the Lord’s work and brings an end forever to the idea of a Palestinian state, which the Palestinians have proven through their support of Hamas is not feasible.

We’re with you, Israel. Bring an end. Godspeed.