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Christmas, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Time, Bacurau and Minari on Monday...
by Sam Juliano Wishing all our dear friends and longtime readers a very Merry Christmas and continues safely during this most difficult of times. Lucille and I have been hunkered at home watching...
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INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘AFTER THE REHEARSAL’“Something has changed…”
© 2020 by James Clark One could say there isn’t really “a Bergman film;” inasmuch as each constituent episode weaves into a very large and a very challenging reflection. Long before he began to...
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Monster Bash Pinball, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and Christmas movies on...
by Sam Juliano Today’s Monday Morning Diary was delayed because of a driving run to Connecticut to pick up a new in box Monster Bash pinball machine remake from the Chicago Gaming Company. Lucille,...
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Robert Altman’s Popeye
By J.D. Lafrance Popeye (1980) is the film you get when the powers that be entrust a big budget, high-profile project to an idiosyncratic maverick like Robert Altman who proceeds to take the studio’s...
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Run and Borat: Subsequent to MovieFilm on Monday Morning Diary (January 4)
by Sam Juliano 2021 has at all last arrived. Rarely does one wish ahead in fear of making short shrift of their own lives, but as 2020 was by all estimation the year from hell, one can only hope that...
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Insurrection at the Capitol and Pieces of a Woman on Monday Morning Diary...
by Sam Juliano Wednesday, January 6th will live in infamy, Much as FDR noted the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. Provoked and inspired by a deranged President who for weeks had been spreading lies to...
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INGMAR BERGMAN’s WAITING WOMEN “The distress button is broken”
© 2021 by James Clark Our film today, Waiting Women (1952), will forever be understood as only a “minor” effort due to being an early film in Ingmar Bergman’s history and therefore supposedly...
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Inauguration Day and One Night in Miami on Monday Morning Diary (January 18)
by Sam Juliano Happy Birthday to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose life and speeches seem more relevant today than they were since the civil rights marches of the mid 60s. Sadly his inspiration...
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John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow II
by J.D. Lafrance After the smash box office success of A Better Tomorrow (1986) in its native country of Hong Kong and other Asian territories, the film’s producer Tsui Hark convinced its director...
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A new beginning on Monday Morning Diary (January 25)
by Sam Juliano And so it came to pass. Inauguration day 2021 has installed some reason and hope in the White House, while the isolated former Chief Executive stews in his Florida estate, still in...
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The Killers
By J.D. Lafrance Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” was first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1927 and featured two hitmen sent to kill a man who makes no attempt to run or defend...
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Chaos and Mayhem still holding sway on Monday Morning Diary (February 1)
by Sam Juliano While so many of us are tying hard to re-focus on what has always mattered the most to us in our lives, we continue to be diverted by the political fireworks, the latest of which...
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CLAIRE DENIS’ TOWARDS MATHILDE “It’s still a little, let’s say, muddied…”
© 2021 by James Clark The films of Claire Denis concentrate upon Herculean endeavors coming to grief with a deficit of consummation. For her, it’s the quiet notice that makes the difference. In...
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The Dig, Super Bowl Sunday and staying the course on Monday Morning Diary...
by Sam Juliano R.I.P. Christopher Plummer, the renowned Shakespearean actor whose fame will forever be mainly centered around his beloved performance as Captain Von Trapp in 1965’s musical legend The...
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Phil Moore is Tops: A Jazz Man at MGM
Phil Moore at piano, circa 1946, with John O. Levy on bass. Photo by William P. Gottlieb. Courtesy Library of Congress (LC-GLB13-0639) by Lee Price Phil Moore, Part One: The Jackie Robinson of...
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Less Than Zero
By J.D. Lafrance In 1985, Bret Easton Ellis’ debut novel Less Than Zero was published when he was only 20 and still in college. Its debauched tale of bored and hedonistic Los Angeles rich kids became...
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CNN specials, school openings and improvement on the COVID front on Monday...
by Sam Juliano We all knew of course that the impeachment trial would end up the way it did and that partisanship would eclipse any valid evidence of treasonous insurrection on behalf of our former...
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Phil Moore is Tops, Part Two: Animating Race
Phil Moore credit in Rooty Toot Toot (1951). by Lee Price Did You Ever See an Elephant Fly? Who was in the room that day in spring 1941 at the Walt Disney Studio when the Hall Johnson Choir did their...
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Nomadland, The Two of Us, Another Round and Cowboys on Monday Morning Diary...
by Sam Juliano Though I traveled up to and spent time every single day at the school my wife and I are employed at during this “down” time, today marks the “official” return of the district teachers...
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Phil Moore Is Tops, Part 3: Top of the Charts!
David Niven in the opening scene of A Matter of Life and Death (1946). by Lee Price The Voice of America in 1945 Opening with the most gripping flirtation scene ever filmed, set against a backdrop of...
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