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ADVISORY: AMERICAN HOT WAX
American Hot Wax, discussed in previous postings, will be screened on TCM on Sept. 27 at 1:30 AM ET. It will also be streamed on Watch TCM Sept. 28 through Sept. 30. As it is not easy to come across, it…
Keep readingAdventures in the World of Film Production and Exhibition
The end of summer is, like February, a desolate time in film exhibition; how much worse, then, the prospects of writing about film. Granted, I don’t limit myself to current releases, but then how much can one say about a film…
Keep readingStreets of Fire
ROCK N’ ROLL ON FILM Part II: Streets of Fire At any given moment, a film has a pulse; over the course of its running time, it has more than one. They can be dramatic, sonic, visual, cinematic. They can interact…
Keep readingROCK N’ ROLL ON FILM
Part 1: Elvis, The Beatles, and Grease, et al. Since Bill Haley and the Comets electrified Hollywood during the opening credits of Richard Brooks’ Blackboard Jungle with their Rock Around the Clock in the early 1950s, the film industry in the…
Keep readingSidney Poitier: Actor
Richard Widmark, a supremely brave and accomplished American actor, now long removed to TCM and the mists of memory, and Sidney Poitier, an equally brave and accomplished American actor, now justifiably enshrined in the imagined pantheon of American cultural history, joined…
Keep readingStephen Sondheim (1930-2021)
“White. A blank page or canvas. His favorite. So many possibilities…” [1] In my childhood, for economic reasons we were not a family that habituated Broadway musicals; we did see all the movie adaptations and such original musical films as were…
Keep readingAn Old Fashioned Double Bill
By the time you read this, I will have added another birthday to my list of attributes. Which birthday? Let’s just say I was born into Harry Truman’s presidency. OK, I hate coyness about age. 73rd. In my early years in…
Keep readingClint Eastwood and “Cry Macho”
American performing artists do not generally go gentle into that good night. As Dylan Thomas eloquently exhorted his father to do, they rage against the dying of the light so long that one sometimes uncharitably wishes they would give it up…
Keep readingWhat the Hell is This?
I retired recently from a comfortable post as Associate Professor of Communications at a small university in New Jersey. I imagine this blog as a way of keeping the edge in my thinking that I had honed in a near-lifetime of…
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Gonna Say it Now 