The Steve McQueen movie that Steve McQueen hated
From my reading of various Steve McQueen biographies, I’ve always assumed the star’s little-seen 1961 comedy “The Honeymoon Machine” was a hopeless bomb. McQueen got top billing, but the picture came...
View Article‘Star Wars’ flap or: when filmmakers tamper with classics
From Sept. 2, 2011 – Many fans of the three original “Star Wars” films have been on the warpath on the Internet recently with the announcement that the forthcoming Blu-ray boxed set of all six films...
View Article‘Amour’: Michael Haneke’s unflinching look at aging
In the relatively short but excellent “making of” special feature on the new “Amour” DVD the Austrian director Michael Haneke talks about the difficulty of doing something very simple in a movie....
View Article‘Dave Chappelle’: longer than an article, shorter than a book
I was surprised recently when a very smart acquaintance of mine announced that she didn’t have an e-Reader and would never get one. The fact that the woman is a book reviewer made the statement even...
View Article‘Tales of the City’ — another template for today’s prestige TV
Young critics who believe that the notion of quality, non-commercial TV began with the launch of “The Sopranos” on HBO in 1999 need to check out the DVD reissue of “Tales of the City” that was released...
View Article‘Out of Print’: the end of film?
An interesting little 2014 documentary, “Out of Print,” has popped up in the Amazon Prime line-up. Directed by Julia Marchese, the film is ostensibly a love letter to the Los Angeles repertory movie...
View ArticleMTM & the great 1970s CBS Saturday night
Like nearly everyone else with a TV set during the 1970s, Alfred Hitchcock was a fan of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” calling it “one of the oases in what has been called the wasteland of television.”...
View ArticleThe lost Michael Chabon adaptation
“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” arrived on video seven years ago as seriously damaged goods. Shot in 2006 and screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007, the picture received mostly withering reviews...
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