A guide to this blog’s James Bond marathon can be found right here. MOONRAKERDirected by Lewis GilbertWritten by Christopher WoodPremiered 26 June, 1979 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCEQuiz time, everybody! What Bond film opens with a pre-title sequence that starts with the mysterious theft of a large military vehicle that sends the British government into a tizzy, whereupon […]
The 2012 edition of Total Recall is hella pretty. It has pretty sets designed by Patrick Tatapoulos that create either a bright, shiny future with lots of things that go “whizzzz!”, or a damp, broken future that still looks just nifty as shit and way expensive. It has pretty cinematography by Paul Cameron, who finessed […]
Every Sunday this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: I like to try to be more imaginative than to great a new remake by reviewing the original in […]
A guide to this blog’s James Bond marathon can be found right here. THE SPY WHO LOVED MEDirected by Lewis GilbertWritten by Christopher Wood and Richard MaibaumPremiered 7 July, 1977 PRE-TITLE SEQUENCESuch a grab-bag of unrelated plot globules that it seems almost impossible to imagine they stuck it all into eight minutes: we start on […]
1961’s The Misfits is an awfully good movie with some very particular flaws, whose qualities as a work of cinema have been totally overshadowed by two facts concerning its production; or one fact with two branches, depending on how you want to look at it. Namely, it was the last completed feature for two titanic […]
It is frequently proposed that Some Like It Hot is the best movie comedy ever made, and those looking for an iconoclastic opinion on this front will, I am afraid, need to look elsewhere. For it is the best movie comedy of all time, says I, and only partially because it is the funniest. Which […]
In her relatively brief career (12 years from her featured coming-out moment in All About Eve until her death in 1962), Marilyn Monroe played all sorts of sex kittens – scheming, implausibly innocent, unexpectedly wounded – but the one that hews closest to the idea that has come down to the modern day as the […]
