Sydney Pollack: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Sydney Pollack’s adaptation of Horace McCoy’s Depression-era novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is as engrossing and affecting as I’m sure it was when it was released in 1969. The existential look at the celebrity machine and the producers (here in the form of a dance competition coordinator) that exploit the hopeful masses of one day “making it” differs from the source material (the film is definitely a little more frenetic than the book), but what film doesn’t take liberties with its...

Read More

6 comments

Summer of Slash: Superstition

Watching nothing but straight forward slasher movies for an entire summer can be a bit of a slog; this is why I prefer mixing it up by finding different kinds of horror movies with elements of the slasher. Earlier in this series I covered the sci-fi/slasher hybrid Without Warning, and last year I tackled The Boogeyman – a weird mix of supernatural horror that often detoured into slasher tropes. That brings us to Superstition; a film very similar in tone to The Boogeyman in that it...

Read More

0 comments

Louie – Season One

Be advised that any links provided should be considered very NSFW Louis C.K. reminds me of what punk rock bands used to be. Before punk became just another counter-culture movement that the mainstream exploited, it would act as the very representation for the marginalized and disenfranchised; it was more than just a style of music – it was an attitude, an ethos. With the commercialization of punk rock, everything punk represented was now being adopted by the very people it was never intended...

Read More

1 comment

Summer of Slash: Nightmares in a Damaged Brain

Released as Nightmare in America, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (a title I like much, much better; therefore, I will refer to it by this title throughout this piece) is arguably one of the two or three most infamous titles to appear on the Video Nasties list (I'm going to assume, as I have in the past, that most reading this understand by this point what a Video Nasty is; if not, a simple web search on the subject yields hours of reading material). The director, Romano Scavolini, UK distributor...

Read More

4 comments

Director Retrospective #3 – Sydney Pollack

When I first decided to do director retrospectives for this blog, my mind immediately went towards the polarizing auteur ilk (which explain my first two choices for this series being Oliver Stone and Ken Russell) because it seemed like would be easiest since – no matter how bad the film – there would most likely always be something to talk about. Yes, I’ve been selective so far (covering more of a certain era than all of a filmmakers oeuvre – in the case of Oliver Stone it was for my own sanity...

Read More

2 comments

Summer of Slash: The Burning

I wrote about The Burning when I first started my blog four years ago. The review – which was really short – sucked. I believe it’s still on here somewhere, so if you’re so inclined to search for it – all-the-while seeing what a horribly inept writer I was when I started this thing in 2008 – do so at your own risk (I believe it was part of the first Halloween-themed series I did for the blog, and I unfairly attached my review of the film to the sort-of-similar, but annoyingly tongue-in-cheek,...

Read More

0 comments

Summer of Slash: Without Warning

In light of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus – and whether or not it is or isn’t a good/faithful extension to his horror/sci-fi/slasher Alien – I figured I’d kick off the Summer of Slash this year with a film obviously influenced by Scott’s seminal film. Greydon Clark’s Without Warning (also known by its more apropos drive-in title It Came Without Warning) has very much in common in with Alien (and what horror/sci-fi hybrid post-1979 didn’t) in that it plays more like a slasher than a straight...

Read More

0 comments

The Rookie (1990)

I knew I wanted to review watch and review The Rookie after I was done with the Dirty Harry movies because it seemed like a natural bookend to the series I did back in March. Well, it took me about three months, but I finally got around to writing about Clint’s ‘90s action bomb. What other blogger, I ask, would be so dedicated to delivering a piece on something as insignificant as this movie? If you’re at all curious about the movie by the time you finish this, it’s playing on Netflix...

Read More

0 comments

The West Wing -- Season 5

TV fans are a funny folk; we have a tendency to revere certain writers and producers to the point where they become infallible. The worst of this bares itself out when should the writer/producer not continue to write for the show they helped create – and that show continues to produce new episodes under the guidance of another producer – we completely dismiss the show’s new voice. Perhaps I am describing you – I know I am describing me; it’s one of my biggest faults when it comes to...

Read More

5 comments