Strike Up the Band was the second of four Backyard Musicals Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland made together between 1939 and 1943. When the film was released in 1940, Rooney was in the midst of a three year reign as the top box office star in the country (Garland ranked 10th that year) and, so it’s no …
The River was the third of the so-called “save the farm” movies of 1984-85. Like Places in the Heart and Country we are treated to a gutsy, young farm family who come together to keep their land in the face of attacks from mother nature and the local bank that refuses to help them. Directed …
Hot off her Oscar winning turn in Coal Miners Daughter, Sissy Spacek stars as Nita, the divorced mother of two small boys, who works virtually day and night as a telephone operator in a little house, in a nowhere Texas town, 1944. She hates her job but can’t leave it. Her boss, Mr. Rigby, the …
Released in the fall of 1995, Showgirls became the first big budget, wide release “NC-17” rated film. Despite the presence of director Paul Verhoeven and screenwriter Joe Eszterhas–both coming off the massive success of 1992’s Basic Instinct–and massive hype, Showgirls flopped with audiences and critics alike. The most panned film of the decade, it tarnished …
A frenzied parody of the underrated Airport series (which, incidentally, had already parodied itself by 1980 with the atrocious Concorde: Airport ‘79), many of the gags used in Airplane! have been copied and reworked countless times over the past forty years, resulting in a kind of staleness when seen in their original context. Added to …
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Writer/director Noah Baumbach explored divorce from the perspective of a 16-year-old boy in 2005’s The Squid and The Whale. Marriage Story finds him exploring the deep emotions of a marriage ending from an adult perspective. When the movie begins, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) are in the process of splitting up. Living in …
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Loosely based on the Jane Austen novel, Emma, Clueless focuses on Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) a vapid, spoiled teenager living in Beverly Hills. One of the coolest girls in school, Cher drives a white jeep even though she only has a learner’s permit, and chats on her cell phone. Cher’s mother passed away when she …
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Held up for years because of legal battles between current and former Lynyrd Sknyrd members, Street Survivors is more of an Artimus Pyle biopic (no music by Lynyrd Sknyrd is used) than a film about the famed Southern rock band. Written and directed by Jared Cohn, Street Survivors is about the first-person experience of Pyle …
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The buxom horror hostess Elvira (played by Cassandra Peterson) first appeared on a local Los Angeles station (syndicated to other markets). It wasn’t long before she was appearing on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, guest starring on television shows, and serving as the October pitchwoman for a major beer company. It was only a …
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Released in 1966 and promoted with no gimmicks, Let’s Kill Uncle (also known as Let’s Kill Uncle Before Uncle Kills Us) represents a subdued William Castle. Twelve-year-old Barnaby Harrison (Pat Cardi) has just inherited a small fortune after his father is killed in a car accident. Now orphaned, accompanied by Sgt. Frank Travis (Robert Pickering), …
