I don’t know. I DON’T KNOW, how I missed A Nightmare on Elm Street.  My parents weren’t outwardly strict, but they sort of managed our exposures by just not having certain things available, I’d say.  Like, they didn’t say we couldn’t drink pop, but my Mom didn’t buy it.  Similarly, they didn’t say “you can’t watch Freddy Krueger getting his face peeled off” but they didn’t keep the VHS just […]

Let us rewind: all the way back to 1984. The year of Amadeus, The Killing Fields, Ronald Reagan’s re-election, which somehow did not trigger the neo-fascist technocracy that George Orwell expected right about now, the first mission of the Space Shuttle Discovery, and Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Moving in a little bit, it was in April’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter that the seemingly indestructible Jason Voorhees was interred by […]

“You have a choice of one of three movies for the Orson Welles centennial” says Nathaniel at the end of last week’s post, like he doesn’t even know me. Okay, so I get it, Hit Me with Your Best Shot isn’t entirely or even mostly about me. But come on. Give me a choice between three films directed by one of the greatest visual storytellers in the history of the […]

Ellen Shapiro’s donation to the Carry On Campaign offered a choice: either her favorite movie of all time, or one of the worst movies she’d ever seen. Gratefully, I elect the former – there’s plenty of rarefied crap still to come, and her favorite happens to be a film I’ve always particularly enjoyed. “This is a true story. Although the characters are composites of real men, and time and place […]

Today, the occupation-war in Iraq is five years old. During this war, there have been 3990 US military fatalities, 308 military fatalities among the other coalition armies, and a yet-uncalculated number of Iraqi civilian causalities: as few as 80,000, as many as 10 times that. These figures have all been taken from the Iraq Coalition Casualties Count and Iraq Body Count. For perspective, here is a list of the US […]