Serpico and Turning Black Friday into Good Friday
Sean MurphyLook at that dude. Pacino, clean-shaven and short-haired as the movie begins, sports the best 'stache of the decade, then goes goatee, then gets full facial (hair and head), all…
You Want To See Something Really Scary?* 10 Horrific Scenes for Halloween
First off, a confession of sorts: scary movies don't scare me. Or, to put it less bluntly, as a one-time horror movie aficionado, I quickly outgrew the ways gore supplanted…
R.I.P. Kumar Pallana
Anyone with a passing familiarity with, much less love of, Wes Anderson's films (more on him HERE), will join me in mourning the loss of Kumar Pallana. Nice tribute HERE.…
Remembering (and Celebrating) The Kids In The Hall
(10/16: After yesterday's post, it seems appropriate (and always overdue) to remember how amazing KITH were (are)!) (From PopMatters, 10/07) The Kids in the Hall existed in a sort of…
End of Summer (Camp) with a Bat, a Cat and a Clown
It is an inexorable, if lamentable rite of passage to revisit cultural mementos from one's childhood and discover that, to an adult's eyes, they are lacking. But then, "putting away…
Remembering the USS Indianapolis, Robert Shaw and The Scene
On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis, which had just delivered key components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to the Pacific island of Tinian, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine.…
Dennis Farina: Bad Man, Good Actor
And by bad I mean, of course, badass. Nevermind that he actually was a Chicago cop for many years before he "broke in" to acting (See what I did there?).…
A Week of Americana. Part Five: Chinatown
Chinatown does not usually make the short list of best American films. In fairness, it probably shouldn’t. It will have to settle for merely being the only perfect American film…
Jean Stapleton, R.I.P.
This one hurts, especially for any of us who came of age (or were alive, period) in the '70s. If you were alive in the '70s, you knew about Jean…
The Ballad of Bonnie & Clyde or, Art Improving Upon Life (Revisited)
ON THIS DAY On May 23, 1934, bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were shot to death in a police ambush as they were driving a stolen Ford Deluxe…