Reaction Shots

I really don’t know how many times I’ve seen The Shop Around the Corner , but I have only seen It’s a Wonderful Life a handful of times and I think the last time I saw it, Reagan was president. Both are Christmas holiday staples and for good reason, but or maybe, and I keep bumping up to a subtext in one that is practically text or context in the other. In It’s a Wonderful Life , we run smack dab into capitalist exploitation and the fight against it writ large. In The Shop Around the Corner , it is not, by any stretch, a main theme, but how the workers are treated struck a nerve with me early on and continues to be struck. I don’t think a recap for either is needed as both are pretty etched in the popular consciousness, but while one is more fantastical, the other is very much rom-com. The one focuses on George Bailey, whose self-sacrificed and doing the right thing leads him afoul of Mr. Potter and perhaps, fate itself. When his uncle fails to deposit the $8,000 to cover the Bailey’s...

Rob Reiner (1947-2025) If you were around in the early seventies, you couldn’t miss All in the Family. Norman Lear had created something unique. It wasn’t just a that this was a sitcom with larger issues on its mind; it was both genuinely thoughtful and ridiculously funny. Regardless of how easily described each of the principles were, none of them were caricatures or stereotypes. Archie was a bigot, sure, but he loved his family very much and would occasionally show a gentle side when you least expected it. Edith was the scatterbrain ditz, but she could act with steel resolve and stand up for herself. Gloria was the daughter chafing at still living under her parents’ roof with her husband until they could move out and might have been the most well-rounded character, not being exaggerated or broadly drawn to begin with. And then there was her husband, Mike. Mike was the embodiment of the bleeding heart liberal, the very stereotype (whoops, was I wrong?) of the suburban radical who cou...

  This is likely to wind up being a series. We’re entering the season where prestige movies and big tentpole flicks vie for your attention and the Academy’s. These are not predictions, by the way. However, I wouldn’t and won’t be surprised if a number of titles and names show up on Oscar Night. I should also add that “Oscar bait” doesn’t necessarily infer an unworthy or even bad film. It just serves to delineate some of the elements that AMPAS voters seem to reward movies for, often over and against other, better films or. performances. For example, by no metric that I can think of is Nuremberg a bad or unworthy film. It’s actually quite good, if somewhat too prestige-y for its own good. It’s a tight film dealing with an important historical event - Herman Göring’s surrender to Allied forces and subsequent trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials, and subsequent suicide. The story unfolds via Göring’s psychological assessment by Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelly. Russell Crow as...

The Universal monsters began with   Frankenstein   in 1931. What became the first crossover cinematic universe expanded through the Depression, the Second World War, and into the fifties (though by then, the universe had run its course) and wrapped up with three films featuring the subject of the current film. They began with a bang and finished with a triumph of creature design, atmosphere, and even a couple of thought-provoking turns. I caught all three of the Creature trilogy a couple of times on TV in the seventies and saw the first entry in 3-D for the first time in the mid-80s. I saw it more recently a few days ago, and my goodness, it’s a good looking film and the 3-D worked.  What also worked is the atmosphere of the film and how it held all the other pieces together. The film runs at an efficient 79 minutes but hardly feels rushed. The pacing is deliberate and while we see the hand of the Creature twice, we don’t see him in full until a jump cut in an underwater ...

Every so often, you see a movie that is just, there’s no other way to put it, bad. It’s a wretched non-construct of script, acting, and direction. Every so often, you come across one, though, that calls you to question if that’s not the very point of the film.  I love - that's right: love -  Mesa of Lost Women . It is deliriously bad. And yet, and yet, if you venture into it with the right approach, it can prove to be a challenging work of avant-garde cinema, interrogating plot structure, characters, the passage of time, and interspecies/environmental relationships. Does that sound like a stretch? You bet it does! But look what happens when we take that approach. C’mon down! Let’s start with the opening of two people trudging across a desert with rambling narration that stops when the couple, a man and woman, find safe haven, and resumes when they are surrounded by other characters who may or may not have parts to play in their narrative. When the camera dollies in on one, Pe...