I miss the days when movies occasionally had long weird names like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar. The long name certainly didn’t indicate excellence, but rather a quirky nature; this was not meant to be a mainstream movie. Those usually…
18-year-old and HIV Recently, an 18 year-old-friend of mine told me his doctor told him he had HIV. This young gay man was upset but then told me he hardly ever used condoms and none of his other young friends used them either. What the hell! It’s unbelievable, but many of our younger generation I…
dvd of the week Tarentino’s homage to spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation films of the 1970s is his funniest movie by far and as nearly as fun to watch as Kill Bill Vol. 1. It’s also the movie that probably sets some sort of record for the use of the n-word, and it’s disconcerting, to say…
Spring Breakers I saw Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine’s perverse exploitation art film, with five bears and a couple hundred teenagers who thought they were seeing a Tarentino-fied Where the Boys Are. That said, I doubt any of those kids have ever heard of Where the Boys Are, the 1960 film starring George Hamilton and Yvette…
dvd of the week This under-seen crime drama is Andrew Dominik’s follow-up to the under-seen, but brilliant The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. This one isn’t as powerful, but it’s just as amazing to look at, taking the slow-motion violence style to the pinnacle of the artform. Brad Pitt plays a…
dvd of the week A couple weeks ago, Australia’s film censor banned I Want Your Love for being too sexually explicit, and that is also probably why the Travis Mathew’s film never found a nationwide distributer in the U.S. A gorgeously shot, naturalistic story of the last 36 hours that Jesse (the quite amazing Jesse…
Oz the Great and Powerful When I was a kid, CBS would show The Wizard of Oz every March, and my parents would let my brother and me stay up way past our bedtime to see it. (We had to brush our teeth and get into our pajamas first.) While Star Wars, Superman, and ET…
dvd of the week When I saw that The Intouchables was a true story about a quadriplegic, I found other movies to see. I just didn’t want to do the work. And when I tell you that it is in French and subtitled, you may not want to do the work either. But The Intouchables…
dvr this Turner Classic Movies, 2:45 p.m., Saturday, March 2 TCM is finishing off their annual 31 Days of Oscar, and March 2, they’re playing one of the great underwatched gems of the ‘60s, The Apartment. It stars Jack Lemmon as a milquetoast corporate drone who is forced to loan out his pad to his…
Most comedians will tell you the material they use comes from everyday life happenings and things most of us actually read in the papers and see on the news. These days, comedians pull from whatever source they can to show the humor and absurdity of our everyday lives. Comedian Jason Stuart, who will be bringing…
