The silent era was brilliant for movie comedy. By the late 30s, another great era of movie comedy was well underway. But the early talkies? That was kind of a rough era as people had to figure out wha
I’m always sort of fascinated with what are now older western films about the developing world, largely because they are almost always incredibly shallow discussions of them. In this case, an ov
Tonight starts the new David Simon HBO series, We Own this City, in which he returns to Baltimore to deal directly with police violence. Obviously everyone is going to compare this to The Wire and it
Cecil B. DeMille was a legendary director spanning a very long time, most notably producing two cutting edge productions of The Ten Commandments decades apart. But the switch from silent films to talk
I happened to watch The Natural last night and I am reminded that this is a terrible, no good, awful movie. Almost everything about it is bad. First, it serves just as Robert Redford worship vehicle.
Time to watch one of my very favorite early silent films, the 1903 film The Gay Shoe Clerk, in which a shoe salesman scores big time when his customer shows some hot, sexy ankle and mom is very unhapp
I’d seen quite a few of Les Blank’s documentaries, but I had missed his profile of Clifton Chenier and the Cajun culture around him, Hot Pepper. That it combines music, food, and local tra
I haven’t done much blogging outside the grave and labor series lately due to some unfortunate family circumstances. I haven’t done much movie watching either. But I did watch The French D