Book Review - The Great Movies

The Great Movies by Roger Ebert - The first of a series of books by my all time favorite movie critic.  Before he died he added two more to the series.

Ebert offers relatively brief (couple pages each) commentaries on movies that he thinks belong in the top tier of films.  He admits right off the bat that he can't tell what the standard is for a "great movie".  These are the ones that come to his mind when he thinks about them.  He proceeds to tell you why he believes they belong on the list.

You will recognize plenty of the titles.  Any modest movie lover knows "Casablanca", "Network", "Star Wars", "Pulp Fiction" or "Schindler's List".  Students of the movies will not be surprised to see "Battleship Potemkin", "The Bicycle Thief", "Un Chien Andalue" or "The Seventh Seal" there.  What sucked me in were the odd balls and lesser knowns.  Like "Detour" (which I saw and reviewed after reading about it in the book), the low budget film noir that could be the perfect introduction to this film genre.  It has no pretensions and plenty of flaws.  Yet it remains a truly wonderful movie.  There are plenty of gems among the 100 titles that he explores.

You could easily use this book as the basis for an introduction to film class.  You could still use for upper level course work too.  I was tempted to use it to set up my Netflix queue for the next two years.

If you love the movies and well written commentary(easy to read as well.  Ebert doesn't have to show off), you would be hard pressed to find a better place to start.

Rating - **** Recommended

Movie Review - Bringing Up Baby

Bringing Up Baby - (1938) - A quiet archaeologist (Cary Grant) runs into a flighty heiress (Katherine Hepburn) who upsets his life in general and brings a leopard named "Baby" into his life.  Along the way he discovers that the young woman is also the niece of a woman that is considering donating a million dollars to the museum where he works.  Then an important bone gets lost followed quickly by the leopard.  After that things just start getting silly.

Howard Hawks leads the way on this screwball script with Hepburn in her first ever comedy.  She struggled with it at first until Hawks brought in several veteran comic actors to help.  The result is truly wonderful.  Grant was already an establish comic actor who had a lot more trouble working with his feline co-star than his female one (he and Hepburn would do several more movies together).  While they made good use of split screens and other effects to limit the interaction between Baby and his co-stars there were times when they had to be in the same shot.

While the movie is considered a classic today it was considered a flop at the time.   It performed so badly that Hawks's contract at RKO was cancelled, Hepburn bought out her contract to avoid making more like it and Grant was afraid that it was a sign that he'd never be a star.  Hawks felt that the movie suffered because the madcap action of the leads didn't have a straight person(s) to work against in the story.  The movie would probably have been better anchored if there were but in the end it's still a classic screwball comedy.

The truly funny thing is that if a female character like Susan Vance appeared in a contemporary movie she would almost certainly be the star of a horror film.  She is self centered, manipulative, perfectly willing to say anything to get what she wants and not entirely in touch with reality. She feels perfectly entitled to make off with other people's possessions.   By our standards she is quite simply nuts (that's the technical term)

In the end, you can't argue with success.

Rating = **** Recommended

The End of Film, Big Data and Super Media

 "The View From the Phlipside" is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY.  It can be heard Monday through Friday just after 8 AM and 5 PM.  The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program.  Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moments notice.  WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed.  You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com.  Copyright 2013-14 by Jay Phillippi.  All Rights Reserved.  You like what you see?  Drop me a line and we can talk.

Program scripts from week of February 3, 2014


My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside. 

Super Media                                                                                                    

Normally I like to do a little wrap up of the Super Bowl in the week that follows.  Unfortunately for me I will have to be on the road for the first of the week so I won’t have the chance to do that.  So as I record this show the day BEFORE the big game I thought I’d take a look at what is without argument the single biggest media event of the year in the United States.

Now you may be under the impression that this was a sports event.  You know teams from Seattle and Denver playing the championship game of the most popular sport in our nation.  Well let’s be honest, the game itself just isn’t that a big deal.  I know that there are a lot, and I mean a LOT, of people who pay little to no attention to football during the regular season and playoffs who will suddenly show up for the Super Bowl.  It’s not because the quality of the play jumps up for this game.

No it’s the media aspects that make the difference.  Take a look at the first Super Bowl, which, parenthetically wasn’t even called the Super Bowl.  That didn’t happen till the third one.  In  1967 that first AFL-NFL Championship Game wasn’t nearly the show it is today.  It was broadcast on both CBS and NBC, it is the only one of the series that wasn’t a sell out and a 30 second ad sold for only forty two thousand dollars.  Oh and the half time show?  The marching bands from the Universities of Arizona and Grambling.

Since then the commercials have gotten outrageously expensive and sometimes astoundingly creative.  While last year’s game actually gave you a reason to watch more often than not the commercials are a lot more interesting than the football.  As for the half time shows they have grown progressively more complex.  Right up to ten years ago when the show was so complicated that the rehersal ran more than four hours long.  Following some changes required by the league to the show two of the performers decided to add a little risque twist to the show.  When Justin Timberlake pulled off a little more of Janet Jackson’s costume than expected we all learned the phrase “Wardrobe Malfunction” and the FCC proceeded to lose its marbles.  All over something that took something like nine sixteenths of a second.

It may not be a great game but it’s likely to be the most watched television broadcast of the year (it has been recently) and the second largest watched event in the world (after the World Cup).

Yeah, it’s really about the media.  And now we can all get on with our lives for another year.


Super Media                                                                                                        

With the return of the Net Neutrality issue to the middle of the media discussion and the ongoing concern over our national Intelligence organizations gathering all kinds of information about us many of us are actively thinking about the amount of data that may be floating around out there about us.  So let me give you a catchall name for that phenomenon.  It’s called “Big Data” and it has a whole bunch of problems of its own.

I’m not talking about the ones we normally think about.  On the other side of the issue there are problems as well.  First of all there’s the fact that big data is, well, big.  Enormous.  Gigantic.  Elephantine.  In fact we may need to come up with a whole new word just to describe it.  If you’re someone trying to make some sense out of all of this you completely understand the image of trying to drink from a firehose.

There is so much data being generated every day by millions of millions of people that most systems just can’t keep up.  You need specialized programs to sort through it all that have some kind of method of sifting the important stuff from the stuff most of us generate.  Then you need people who are accustomed to dealing with this massive weight of information.  Here’s the problem.  The programs only sort of exist and there aren’t nearly enough of the people to deal with the output of the programs we have at the moment.

This isn’t the first time we’ve had this problem.  Back in the early days of the Cold War the United States began to intercept massive amounts of Soviet coded information.  We lacked the computers, the codebreakers and the time to deal with the massive amount of information that poured in.  Decades later millions of pages of information still hadn’t been processed.

So what’s likely to happen with the problems of big data in the 21st Century?

The software will get better, the computers will get faster and more people will begin to specialize in its analysis.  The other curious side effect is that big data users will begin to change how they gather the information.  Some experts are saying that rather than gathering EVERYTHING they will have us do some of the filtering based on how we’re asked to share our information.

Meanwhile some of us will get more careful how our information is shared.  Most people won’t understand the issues or the problems.  For those people big data will remain just too big to comprehend.

RIP Pete Seeger                                                                                                                       

I have very mixed feelings about this next topic.  I am aware that technology marches on and the old must make way for the new.  I’m also aware that we’ve been through this same shift in several other areas of the media and have survived, even thrived in many ways.  But this is different.

The movies are moving away film.  Most of us don’t even think about it but when we go to the movies we are watching them presented in the same way they’ve been presented for decades.  Our parents watched them pretty much the same way and even our grandparents would recognize the basic technology.  It’s called 35 millimeter motion picture film.  The same basic technology that was the basis of still photography for more than a century.  Expose the film, develop the negative then create the positive print.  Pretty straightforward.

Of course film in the still photography world is largely a thing of the past.  I’ve been a hobby photographer since the 1970s and it’s been years since the last roll of film passed through my camera.  I still love photography and have enjoyed learning about digital imaging.  We went through a similar challenge when we moved away from vinyl for music recording to digital.

But I still have reservations about this shift.  First of all is the visual difference between film and digital recording.  Too often it’s easy to spot the video versus the film.  It looks different and I’m not sure its an improvement.

I understand the business aspects of this decision.  Paramount is leading the way announcing the current “Wolf of Wall Street” is the first wide release movie to come ONLY in digital form.  There’s a huge savings on creating prints and physically shipping them worldwide.  Now they can be delivered electronically or by satellite.
Beyond my artistic concerns are the worries of the archival community.  There are advantages to having a negative to preserve.  Kept at a proper temperature and humidity an old fashion negative will last for centuries.  With digital formats changing seemingly every decade or less the cost of trying to keep a master library could quickly become astronomical.  Because early movies weren’t considered worth preserving there is at least a decade of the early days of the movies we have completely lost.

We need to make sure we don’t make the same mistake again.

Call that the View From the Phlipside

Movie Review - Children of Men

Children of Men (2006) - In a dystopian future (only a little more than a decade from now) humanity is faced with total collapse after every woman becomes infertile.  The sudden appearance of a pregnant woman pits different political factions against one another while one man tries to get her to sanctuary.

I'm always amazed when Hollywood decides to go the dystopian route.  They're just tough movies to sell to the broad audience.  Americans like happy endings and this kind of story generally doesn't offer one.  When I saw the previews I was excited.  It struck me as a great concept and one that hadn't been done to death.  Following the sudden end of pregnancy the world goes to hell in a hand basket.  In Great Britain they've closed the borders and are actively ridding themselves of illegal immigrants.  The resulting society isn't one that anyone would want.  It's violent and devoid of humanity.  As the government cracks down revolutionary opposition groups pop up (called "The Fish").  Once upon a time Theo (Clive Owen) has been one of them.  But as the years went on his idealism died.   Walking the streets one day he is kidnapped by the Fish and confronted by his ex-wife (Julianne Moore).  She asks him to help the pregnant girl escape to a sanctuary.  From the moment he agrees his life is no longer his own.

Based on a novel by P.D. James the movie never quite pulls it off for me.  The cast is excellent with Owen, Moore, Michael Caine, and Chiwetel Ejiofor carrying most of the movie.  At the end director Alfonso Cuaron leaves us with an appropriate ending for the genre of the story.  Somehow it just left me feeling a little on the "meh" side of the equation.  There was very little exploration of the issues that create the context for the story.  It's mostly treated as just an excuse for chase scenes and firefights.

I had hoped for so much more.  If you've got nothing better to do this could fill two hours you could do wors than this.

Rating -***  Worth A Look

Tracking the Top 100

This is the American Film Institute’s 2007 list of the top 100 American movies; I’ve put the ones I’ve seen in bold. I've included only those movies that I've seen the whole way through.  I had checked it a couple years ago and had scored about 60% of them.  Just updated it and now I'm at 70%.  10 of the top 10 and 18 of the top 20.

1. Citizen Kane, 1941.

2. The Godfather, 1972.

3. Casablanca, 1942.

4. Raging Bull, 1980.

5. Singin’ in the Rain, 1952.

6. Gone With the Wind, 1939.

7. Lawrence of Arabia, 1962.

8. Schindler’s List, 1993.

9. Vertigo, 1958.

10. The Wizard of Oz, 1939.

11. City Lights, 1931.

12. The Searchers, 1956.

13. Star Wars, 1977.

14. Psycho, 1960.

15. 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968.

16. Sunset Blvd., 1950.

17. The Graduate, 1967.

18. The General, 1927.

19. On the Waterfront, 1954.

20. It’s a Wonderful Life, 1946.

21. Chinatown, 1974.

22. Some Like It Hot, 1959.

23. The Grapes of Wrath, 1940.

24. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, 1982.

25. To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962.

26. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939.

27. High Noon, 1952.

28. All About Eve, 1950.

29. Double Indemnity, 1944.

30. Apocalypse Now, 1979.

31. The Maltese Falcon, 1941.

32. The Godfather Part II, 1974.

33. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975.

34. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937.

35. Annie Hall, 1977.

36. The Bridge on the River Kwai, 1957.

37. The Best Years of Our Lives, 1946.

38. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948.

39. Dr. Strangelove, 1964.

40. The Sound of Music, 1965.

41. King Kong, 1933.

42. Bonnie and Clyde, 1967.

43. Midnight Cowboy, 1969.

44. The Philadelphia Story, 1940.

45. Shane, 1953.

46. It Happened One Night, 1934.

47. A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951.

48. Rear Window, 1954.

49. Intolerance, 1916.

50. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001.

51. West Side Story, 1961.

52. Taxi Driver, 1976.

53. The Deer Hunter, 1978.

54. M-A-S-H, 1970.

55. North by Northwest, 1959.

56. Jaws, 1975.

57. Rocky, 1976.

58. The Gold Rush, 1925.

59. Nashville, 1975.

60. Duck Soup, 1933.

61. Sullivan’s Travels, 1941.

62. American Graffiti, 1973.

63. Cabaret, 1972.

64. Network, 1976.

65. The African Queen, 1951.

66. Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1981.

67. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1966.

68. Unforgiven, 1992.

69. Tootsie, 1982.

70. A Clockwork Orange, 1971.

71. Saving Private Ryan, 1998.

72. The Shawshank Redemption, 1994.

73. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969.

74. The Silence of the Lambs, 1991.

75. In the Heat of the Night, 1967.

76. Forrest Gump, 1994.

77. All the President’s Men, 1976.

78. Modern Times, 1936.

79. The Wild Bunch, 1969.

80. The Apartment, 1960.

81. Spartacus, 1960.

82. Sunrise, 1927.

83. Titanic, 1997.

84. Easy Rider, 1969.

85. A Night at the Opera, 1935.

86. Platoon, 1986.

87. 12 Angry Men, 1957.

88. Bringing Up Baby, 1938.

89. The Sixth Sense, 1999.

90. Swing Time, 1936.

91. Sophie’s Choice, 1982.

92. Goodfellas, 1990.

93. The French Connection, 1971.

94. Pulp Fiction, 1994.

95. The Last Picture Show, 1971.

96. Do the Right Thing, 1989.

97. Blade Runner, 1982.

98. Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1942.

99. Toy Story, 1995.

100. Ben-Hur, 1959.

From My Shelves - The Marx Brothers

The Marx Brothers - It was sometime in either very late high school or early college that I got into the Marx Brothers.  You'll find no less than 12 titles on my shelves (listed at the end).  If memory serves a friend in high school (who bore a more than passing resemblance to Groucho when he put his mind to it) first put them on my radar.  In birth order they are Leonard (Chico), Arthur (Harpo), Julius (Groucho), Milton (Gummo) and Herbert (Zeppo).  The brothers began as vaudeville performers then made the transition to Broadway.  Performing was a family business in more ways than one.  Their uncle was Al Shean of Gallagher and Shean, vaudeville and Broadway stars in their own right.  Shean helped the boys write some of their early material.

Their comedy is based on set characters and the natural abilities of the brothers themselves.  Groucho had a legendary ability to ad lib through anything.  His side comments and sly innuendo are still astounding all these years later.  Groucho is the godfather of snark.  The smartest and most talented of the group may have been Harpo who is supposed to have been able to play no less than 6 instruments. Including, of course, the harp.  The Marx Brothers were outrageous, unpredictable and bizarre.  At the same time they were brilliant, witty and sarcastic.  Nothing was safe from their mockery.

The early movies ("Cocoanuts" and "Animal Crackers") are film versions of their hit Broadway shows.  While the material is quite good it suffers from being very "stagy".  Neither the brothers nor their studio(Paramount) really knew how to bring that Marxian madness fully to the screen.  Things are a better fit to the movies as they move into "Monkey Business" and "Horse Feathers".  "Duck Soup" is generally acclaimed as the greatest Marx Brothers movie of them all.  It was not one of their more successful ones (the political overtones probably put people off) and I'll admit that while I admire the movie it isn't my favorite of them all. (Interesting local note on "Duck Soup" - the fictional country in the movie is "Freedonia" and the leadership of Fredonia, New York asked Paramount to take out the reference claiming it was hurting their town.  Groucho responded by asking them to change their name because it was hurting his movie)

For me the greatest Marx Brothers movies come when they move to MGM and begin working with Irving Thalberg.  "A Night at the Opera" and "A Day at the Races" are better plotted, more disciplined scripts that really show off the brothers to their best effect.  Thalberg was the "Boy Wonder" with a magic touch and it shows in these two movies.  The downside is that he also insisted on including musical numbers and a romantic story line that really doesn't help the overall movie.  They look especially dated now.  Nevertheless, I believe these two movies are the Marx Brothers at their peak (Groucho would agree in interviews later in his life).  Sadly Thalberg died before filming was complete on "Races" and the MGM brain trust had no idea what to do with the act (plus the brothers could be a bit, um, disruptive when they put their minds to it.  MGM liked order and the Marx Brothers are about anarchy).  The rest of their movies are lesser lights.  They would make "Room Service" at RKO, return to MGM for "At the Circus", "Go West" and "The Big Store".  At that point they announced their retirement from the movies.  To help Chico pay off gambling debts the brothers would reunite for "A Night in Casablanca" and "Love Happy".  By the end the brothers were showing their age.

After the movies were behind them the brothers dabbled in a variety of things.  Chico had his own band for a while (with Mel Torme as singer!), Groucho had some additional fame and success on television with "You Bet Your Life".  They made the occasional guest star appearances as well.  The two youngest brothers (who had only limited or no roles in the movies) Gummo and Zeppo actually founded a very successful talent agency.

Chico went first in 1961.  He was followed by Harpo in '64, Groucho and Gummo in '77 and Zeppo in '79.

Modern viewers may have a little trouble connecting with the rhythm of the comedy of the '20s and '30s that is the bread and butter for the Marxes, especially in their earlier movies.  I think that's one of the reasons that the two Thalberg films do so well.  If you can make that internal shift you will be amply rewarded.

The Marx Brothers are truly special and unique talents.  No one else has ever come close to the level of genius that they brought to the screen.  If a lot of their act seems familiar it's because they've had such a profound effect on so many performers that followed them.

On the shelf -

• The Cocoanuts
• Animal Crackers
• Monkey Business
• Horse Feathers
• Duck Soup
• A Day at the Races
• A Night at the Opera
• Go West
• The Big Store
• Room Service (featuring Lucille Ball)
• At the Circus
• A Night in Casablanca

(The only "major" title I'm missing is "Love Happy" which features a walk on by Marilyn Monroe)

Best of the Web - The Hunt for Gollum

The Hunt for Gollum - (2009) - This is a low budget, independent and unofficial prequel to the Lord of the Rings movies.  It tells the story of Aragorn's pursuit and capture of Gollum.  This story is told primarily in the appendices of the Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books.

No, that's not Viggo.
And yes, it looks a LOT like him!

Made by a group of fans on a budget of about $5,000 (US).  Writer/Producer/Director Chris Bouchard acknowledges the inspiration of the Peter Jackson major motion pictures.  This is really an astounding piece of fan video.  The production crew consisted of 160 volunteers as they shot in parts of England and Wales.  The final version debuted in 2009 and is well past 12 million views.  An awful lot of fan produced media is simply awful.  This shows the potential of work created by people who truly love the original material.

What's really astounding is the quality of the cinematography and the direction.  With all the tacky, poorly shot video out there it's wonderful to run into something that has some quality to it.  It's not perfect but it stands head and shoulders above most.  Bouchard has a feel not only for the material but also the medium in which he is creating.

The movie runs 38 minutes long and can be viewed for free on YouTube.  View it HERE
Take a look at the production home page HERE

Movie Review - Detour

Detour - (1945) - Piano play Al Roberts decides to follow his singer girlfriend to Hollywood.  With virtually empty pockets he hitchhikes across the country from New York City.  Along the way he meets a bookie and a dangerous young woman named Vera (Ann Savage).  Between the two of them they will destroy Al Roberts life.

Here's film noir stripped down to its bare essence.  It's dark and cynical with a strong sexual undertone.  People die mysteriously and there's money to be made.  Al Roberts will be offered several choices and he'll muff all of them.  Vera thinks she's got the world on a string and all she has to do is pull.  When the string does get pulled she won't like the outcome.  Sadly the meddling of the Hollywood Production Code of the day doesn't let this movie end the way it should have ended.  The sets are cheap, the acting is spotty and periodically the movie flips (literally.  After shooting several scenes during the hitchhiking section they realized that all the travel was moving left to right on the screen.  By tradition westward movement is done right to left.  With only a limited budget they just flipped the negative.  So periodically cars suddenly have right hand drive steering wheels!).  Yet somehow this movie works.  The actors had little to no experience but there's a chemistry between them and the dialogue that works.  Vera is the dangerous but attractive woman, Al is the weak man.  In just 68 minutes the movie managed to become a classic.

I had never heard of "Detour" before reading Roger Ebert's "The Great Movies".  The legend is that the movie was made for $20,000 in 6 days (later scholarship says probably $100,000 in about a month but still a cheap, fast movie).  It comes at the very dawn of the film noir age in the United States.  You could spend a week noting all the things that could have been done better but why not take a little time and enjoy all that it does well?

Rating - **** Recommended

Movie Review - Singing In The Rain

Singin' in the Rain - (1952) - Silent movie stars Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) are faced with the end of their careers as the age of the talkie dawns.  Lockwood's acting style doesn't work in the new age and Lamont's voice was made for silents (and silence).  With the help of Lockwood's boyhood pal Cosmo Brown (Donald O'Connor) and ingenue Kathy Selden (Debby Reynolds) they find a way to turn a silent turkey into a musical smash.

This is arguably the greatest movie musical of all time.  This is a movie that was actually built around the singing and dancing.  The story is just an add on to tie all the important bits together.  This show carries it's own store of legend.  Kelly's tyrannical direction, the iconic "Singin' in the Rain" sequence was done in a single take with Kelly suffering from a 100+ degree temperature, Reynolds dancing so hard she burst a blood vessel, O'Connor having to rest for three days following the "Make 'Em Laugh" routine only to be told that it had to be re-shot in its entirety.

Great songs, great dancing, just enough story.  For me the greatest joy out of this show is the performance of song and dance great Donald O'Connor.  I first ran across him watching old movies on Saturday and Sunday afternoons as a kid.  For me he will always be linked with Francis the Talking Mule.  Which is really an awful legacy for such a great performer.  Kelly is his usual athletic self dancing, Reynolds holds her own (which is impressive for a 19 year old with so little dance experience that Kelly criticized to the point of tears.  It was Fred Astaire who helped her make the grade in the movie as a favor to the youngster) plus there's Cyd Charisse in the obligatory "high art" dance section.  Makes me think of the "Choreography" bit in "White Christmas". In the end the singing and dancing is more than enough. This was a movie that is so much more than it's legend. Given how high that legend stands, that's saying quite a bit. Rating - ***** Must See

Movie Review - A Streetcar Named Desire

A Streetcar Named Desire - (1951) - Movie adaptation of the classic Tennessee Williams play of the same name.  Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) arrives at the home of her sister Stella (Kim Hunter) and her husband Stanley (Marlon Brando).  Blanche's disintegrating mental state and Stanley's personality clash leading both into dark places.

This is another movie that I had a mental idea of what it was all about going into viewing it only to discover something different.  Here's the classic description of the story (taken from IMDB):

Disturbed Blanche DuBois moves in with her sister in New Orleans and is tormented by her brutish brother-in-law while her reality crumbles around her.

Stanley is the villain, a brutish, macho monster that destroys Blanche.  She is a fragile blossom of southern femininity that wilts before his passionate animal essence.

So why do I feel so much sympathy for Stanley for most of the movie?  Don't get me wrong, Kowalski is not some gentleman driven off his spot.  He is passionate, he is primal in many ways.  For me, Stanley Kowalski is a man with a simple world view confronted by something so far outside his ken and so perfectly tuned to attack him at his weakest that he, like Blanche, will crack under the burden.  To be honest I can't blame him.  Blanche (like many of Williams's greatest female characters) lives in a fantasy world.  She still wants to be the belle of the ball from her days when the family had money and stature.  Those days are far behind and she has lost everything.  Her inheritance, her beloved home, her stature in her hometown, her marriage and all but the last thread of her sanity.  Stanley Kowalski is just as perfectly tuned to destroy her as she is for him.

This movie is all about Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando's performance of this apocalyptic collision.  Hunter and the rest of the cast are little more than scenery as these two brilliant actors devour the screen.  Which is saying quite a bit since Karl Malden (who is one of Stanley's poker and bowling buddies and becomes a suitor for Blanche) and Kim Hunter won Oscars for their  performances. (The movie received 11 nominations and won 4, the two above plus Vivien Leigh as Best Actress in a Leading Role and Best Art Direction/Set Decoration.  Brando was nominated but lost out to Humphrey Bogart for "The African Queen")

This is a movie that should be on every movie lovers list of Must See Movies.  Just don't be surprised if it's not the movie you expect.

Rating - ***** Must See

And On to a New Year

So this is 2014?
Nice.
So far, at least.

Let's get started this year with some thought about why we do what we do and what we are going to do this.

This blog will continue to be "home base" for my radio show "The View From the Phlipside" (now airing M-F at 8 AM and 5 PM on WRFA-LP, Jamestown, NY).  I haven't noted in a while that what you see is the relatively rough scripts that I write each week.  I spend a little time cleaning them up but I just don't have the time and energy to turn them into proper essays.  When I record them I count on my ability to shape them as I go along.  This results in some convoluted sentence structure in the scripts and some missing punctuation and grammar points.  They are what they are and they are written to be spoken aloud.

I will continue to offer some reviews of movies and books.  My focus will be more on older materials.  The reason for this is that there is plenty of contemporary reviews of new media.  The hope of these reviews has always been that I can point people to things that they may not know or may know but aren't sure if they would like.  For all the media that is created new in this age there is still a massive backlog of things too good to simply fall away.  Because I don't get to see as many new movies in the theater as I'd like I'll still watch and review newer stuff too.  But the focus will be on older materials.

There is something new that I hope to explore this year.  That's the highest quality material available on the web.  This will NOT be a review of dog/cat videos and the like.  I believe that there is some real quality material out there that doesn't get the attention it deserves.  I want to be part of fixing that.  If I'm wrong then the Internet is really nothing more than a children's toy and we need to face that if true.

Over the next couple weeks I hope to take some time to fiddle with the site, re-arrange things, maybe remodel the place a bit.  For the moment I am unemployed and so I have the time to go a little deeper.  I also hope to do some writing that looks a little deeper that I can spread across at least the next couple months along with the usual suspects (Great movie, by the way, "The Usual Suspects".  It's the movie that made me say "Kevin Spacey?  Gotta keep my eyes open for this guy").  These posts will appear (assuming I find something worth including) as "The Best of the Web".  I'm kind of looking forward to exploring all this.  If you have a suggestion feel free to pass it along via the comments.

Movie Review - Argo

Argo - (2012) - Based (somewhat loosely) on the rescue of six Americans that escaped from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran at the beginning of the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1980.  A plan to get them out under cover of a fake movie company working on a movie called "Argo".  The question is always will they escaped before the Iranians unravel the story?

Three Academy Awards, two Golden Globes, a Screen Actors Guild Award, the accolades are pretty impressive for this one.  And with good reason.  This is a great thriller.  It has all the tension you could want.  Ben Affleck plays the American extraction expert Tony Mendez who will have to go into Iran and pull off the deception.  The six in hiding aren't all convinced that this is a good idea which raises the stakes even higher.  All it will take is one slip and they will all go down.  Iran at that moment in time bore entirely too many similarities to the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution.  It's a great set up for the story.

It's also one of those places where you need to divide fact from fiction.  The screenplay takes some serious liberties with the truth.  (It also takes quite a few minor liberties but that's normal.  You need to move things around sometimes for movie story telling.  I have no trouble with that at all).  The worst is downplaying the role of the Canadian Embassy in the rescue.  President Carter has been quoted as saying "90%" of the idea behind the rescue was Canadian.  And while the real Tony Mendez did do the extraction he was in Tehran for a grand total of a day and a half.  Affleck tries to make up for the snub of the real heroes behind the  rescue with a post-script on the movie but it comes off flat.  That's unfortunate.  It reinforces the perception in parts of the world that Americans are self centered egotists who need to hold the spotlight at all times.

That to one side - it's a lot of fun to watch.

Rating - **** Recommended (but read the history afterwards)

Movie Review - "42"

"42" (2013) -  The story of the player that broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball.  Jackie Robinson was chosen by Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Bra.nch Rickey as the player with both the skill and the strength of character to make history.

Jackie Robinson's story is one of the amazing tales in the world of sports.  Rickey (played by Harrison Ford) decided to take on the unwritten rule that black players were not permitted in the Majors.  Robinson (played by Chadwick Boseman) faced an astounding challenge with virtually no support system.  The movie does a wonderful job of walking through the issues that surrounded this moment in history.  Good writing, acting, and directing.  Nothing gets in the way of the story.

There is one unfortunate historical goof.  Much is made of the conflict between Robinson and a Pirate pitcher named Fritz Ostermueller.  In the movie he hits Robinson in the head.  It never happened in real life and it's unfortunate that they tagged him with a particularly nasty moment.

There's one final reason why this movie is great.  Prior to "42" the baseball movie with the highest opening weekend gross receipts was a movie called "The Benchwarmers".  Astoundingly this Rob Schneider/David Spade movie held the record at over 19 million dollars.  Perhaps even more astounding is the fact that this bad movie (I have I seen the movie?  No.  How do I know it's a bad movie?  It's a Rob Schneider movie.  Case closed.) finished the year as the #52 movie gross of 2006 with 59 million dollars.  How is it that no other real baseball movie managed a better opening weekend than this one?  "Moneyball" just missed.  "The Benchwarmers" out grossed "The Natural", "Bull Durham", "Major League" and "Eight Men Out" among others.  That's just so wrong.  Thank God for "42".

This is a really outstanding movie.

Rating - **** Recommended