Happy Birthday to David Cronenberg’s 1986 adaptation of The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis.
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“Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
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One of the most disturbing movies ever made turns forty years old today
Just feeling meh about the first Avengers: Doomsday trailer
I must be honest, that I’m not completely jazzed about Avengers: Doomsday. Not like what happened the last time the Russo brothers made Marvel movies (Infinity War and Endgame). Maybe I’m just tired of comic book movies? Others seem to be feeling the same. This and Dune Part Three are coming out on the same day and I know which I would get a ticket for.
What about you? Does a new Marvel movie stoke you?
Well anyhoo, here is the first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday.
I do confess that Robert Downey Jr. playing Doctor Doom piques my curiosity. So we’ll see.
And yes, I am aware that there is a new trailer for Dune Part Three. But I haven’t watched it. The first two movies were such a delight (though there was some deviation from the novel) that I want to go into this ...
The Hand of Darth Sidious: A Star Wars Theory by Yours Truly
What if the Palpatine we saw in Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker was not the “real” Palpatine at all? What if he was some kind of replica without an iota of Palpatine/Sidious’s spirit whatsoever?
There is precedent for such a notion.
In Timothy Zahn’s two-part “Hand of Thrawn” novel duology from the late Nineties, the galaxy hears whispers about the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn. Thrawn in the still-venerable expanded universe, you may recall, was killed toward the end of The Last Command. The galaxy thought he was dead. But he prophesied that he would return in ten years’ time if he ever was thought to have died.
Long story short, it turns out that at Thrawn’s hidden fortress (see what I did there?) in the Unknown Regions, the grand admiral had prepared a clone of himself. It had been in stasis all that time. Just waiting ...
Aliens came out forty years ago today
One of the seminal motion pictures of the science-fiction and action genres hit theaters on this date in 1986.
And it still holds its own four full decades later. Aliens is going to prove to be as timeless as its predecessor. I love pretty much everything about this movie.
Bit of a side note: a week and a half before 9/11 I had dinner with Jenette Goldstein, the amazing actress who played Vasquez. She’s an absolutely delightful woman.
Happy anniversary Aliens. And no doubt we will be enjoying you just as much forty more years from now as we do today.
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Memories of the giant turtle
My memoir Keeping the Tryst has been getting around some. I confess, its biggest audience seems to be composed of people who have known me, friends and family. It’s gotten some other purchases, though it’s far from being a “bestseller”. Still, I’ve been happy. And one never knows how far a book will get in the larger scheme of things. A lot of books started out selling small but went on to bigger things.
One of the most consistent remarks that I’ve gotten about Keeping the Tryst has been about my memory. This book covers half a century of the lifetime of an American boy, and it does so in at times almost microscopic detail. As I said in the first chapter, I have no idea how it is that I remember some things so vividly and clearly. It just “is”. Sometimes I feel like Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist
... The trailer for I Play Rocky goes the distance and I wanna see MORE!
I have already told my best friend Chad that if I can get 250 miles to where he lives in November, we are going to see this movie.
Yowza!! I believe already that MGM has a solid, solid hit on their hands. This is going to connect with the fans and the critics. Darn it, we need a feel-good inspirational movie right now, if we ever needed one at all. And the story of how Sylvester Stallone came up from the streets to write and star in Rocky is as inspiring as it gets.
I Play Rocky comes out in select theaters on November 6th and all over the place later in November. Plenty of time for award consideration.
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Haven’t seen Young Washington yet. I did see Disclosure Day though…
On Independence Day some friends asked if I wanted to join them at the theater to see the new Steven Spielberg movie Disclosure Day. I went with them and we agreed afterward that it’s a great movie! Not Spielberg’s best but it’s definitely tapping into “old school Spielberg” that a lot of us remember from our youth, with a dash of the “mature Spielberg” who has been with us since Schindler’s List.
That is how I gauge our greatest living filmmaker. There is the Steven Spielberg that I met at the Boy Scout Jamboree in 1989: the “big kid” who was as giddy as a schoolboy, dancing around in his Scout uniform. That’s the man who brought us E.T. and Indiana Jones and Jaws and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. He had a childlike twinkle in his eye and we were fortunate to have him.
Then Spielberg went
... Thirty years ago we celebrated our Independence Day!
It occurred to me that it was thirty years ago today that the science-fiction blockbuster Independence Day came out in theaters…
I saw this movie seven times that summer! The only other movies I saw during the summer of ’96 were Twister and A Time to Kill. And I can tell you exactly on which dates I saw Independence Day each time.
It was on July 4th that was the first time. I was working a summer job at a bindery and we had a few days off for the holiday. Ed, my best friend at Elon, and I caught the movie at the now-non-existent Janus Theaters in Greensboro, North Carolina. We loved it so much that we caught it again two days later. And then a little over a week later my friend Bennie from Belgium was visiting for a week, and we saw it together. Then a
... Happy 100th Birthday to Mel Brooks!
Only 1900 years more to go!
(Die-hard fans will get the joke 😉 )
And he’s still going nonstop! Coming next year is the long awaited Spaceballs sequel. It wouldn’t surprise me if Mel Brooks has more up his sleeve for after that. The man has been a comedic force of nature for most of his life, what else might he entertain us with?
There is no doubting what I’m doing this afternoon to celebrate Brooks’s centennial. I’m going to watch Blazing Saddles for the hunnerd zillionth time....
So I watched Citizen Vigilante yesterday…
I had never heard of Citizen Vigilante, Uwe Boll’s new film starring Armie Hammer, until a few days ago. That’s when I read that this movie has been effectively banned in Germany and the United Kingdom. Something about it encouraging violence against migrants.
But then Elon Musk made Citizen Vigilante available to watch for free on his X (formerly Twitter) platform. Something that would avoid the censorious thought police and let the people see and decide on their own. Which only made the German and British governments even more furious.
Rush Limbaugh called it the “Streisand Effect”: trying to keep people from watching a thing, makes people want to watch it even more. Suddenly I found myself curious enough to check out Citizen Vigilante. That’s what I spent part of the afternoon yesterday doing.
What did I think?
It’s a far shot from being award-worthy. There have been ...