This Sunday, Turner Classic Movies will be screening George Cukor’s MY FAIR LADY. To enhance the experience, you might want to take a look at a think-piece I published on the movie at this blog’s parent site, PostModern Joan. The piece can be found here.

Beginning July 6, Greg at Cinema Styles blogsite will be hosting an Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon. I’ll be posting my entry here at BOILING SAND. It should be an interesting read, because my make-up teacher in film school was Ed Wood’s make-up man, Harry Thomas. Harry was a great guy and had millions of tales to [...]

That neglected low-budget 1950s horror movie BLOOD OF DRACULA has been rearing its head periodically on late-nite cable. It’s a primo example of an early Herman Cohen production. And a fascinating look at how screenwriter Aben Kandel loads a film with the fears of the Zeitgeist.  Many screenwriters have succeeded at crystalizing the fears of [...]

This posting is part of the Pauline Kael blog-a-thon at The Cooler blogsite. From 1967 through 1979, movie reviews didn’t suck because of Pauline Kael. I’m not saying that none of Kael’s reviews sucked; actually a whole helluvalot of ‘em did. But as a writer, she screwed brilliantly with the literary genre of film criticism [...]

I was surprised by how good the film version of The Ballad of the Sad Café turned out to be. I didn’t think I’d like it. For regular readers of the blog, you may notice that I use two concepts that movie reviewers always use, but I never touch: whether a movie is “good” or [...]

1975 was a year of malaise. The Woodstock vibe was over.  The economy, after seven years of Republicans at the helm, was in the tank with high inflation and no jobs for recent grads.  Music was wandering a wasteland between post-Psychedelic and pre-Disco.  If you were young that year, you were waiting desperately for something [...]

During my misspent youth, I played piano in a bar.   A great friend of mine was also a piano player.   Our styles and tastes were nowhere compatible, but we truly respected each other’s artistic choices and temperament when we’d sit down and play. Several years after becoming friends, Jane Campion’s film THE PIANO [...]

It’s easy to get confused. Some folks mix up El Salvador and San Salvador. Others can’t differentiate between Monique van Vooren and Mamie Van Doren. For me, two ‘big status’ Westerns from the 1950s have always been interchangable in my mind. I’d never seen either one, but their window-dressings are similar: both starred Gary Cooper, [...]