Monday, December 25, 2023

Die Hard

...is not a Christmas movie. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, we can commence discussing this legendary 1988 action flick. Set in a five-hundred-foot skyscraper called the Nakatomi Plaza, terrorists take over...wait, wait. I can't simply leave it at that, can I? It's true that lots of folks...

Saturday, December 16, 2023

Stop Making Sense (and a List of My Favorite Talking Heads Songs)

There's a perfectly eccentric start to the concert, a concert that would be part of Talking Heads' final tour, with frontman David Byrne strolling onto the stage to the sound of adoring fans as he gently places a portable cassette tape on the ground. "Hi," he says. "I've got a tape I want to play,"...

Sunday, April 30, 2023

20 Years of Top Ten Lists

I suppose I was a sophomore in high school when I first jotted down what I thought were the best films I had seen that "Oscar season," among them movies like Chicago and About Schmidt. (I later cheated and added a few when I saw them a few years later—something I try to avoid—such as Monsoon...

Friday, April 28, 2023

Peter Pan and Wendy

 "His eyes were the blue of the forget-me-not, and of profound melancholy, save when he was plunging his hook into you, at which time two red spots appeared in them and lit up horribly. In manner, something of the great seigneur still clung to him, so that he even ripped you up with an air, and...

Sunday, March 12, 2023

All 54 2023 Oscar Nominees, Ranked

In terms of predicting the winners for the 95th Academy Awards, doing so this year is considerably more difficult than it was in recent years. There are genuine horse races in most of the acting nominations, with only comeback kid Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once considered a lock for...