Today we call it a movie
I just stumbled upon this description of a proposal for a patent on an invention in 1876 by Wordsworth Donisthorpe: “The taking of a succession of photographic pictures at equal intervals of time, in order to record the changes taking place in or the movement of the object being photographed, and also by means of […]
Leo Tolstoy meets Cecil B. DeMille
Leo Tolstoy meets Cecil B. DeMille in the latest Avengers flick. Cinematic excess accompanies more characters than even the Russian novelist would have attempted. Yet most Marvel fans will be entertained, and even I (a casual fan) recovered from the mind-numbing action in the film’s second and third acts enough to embrace the ending, which […]
Happy 30th birthday, Roger Rabbit!
Happy 30th birthday, Who Framed Roger Rabbit! Celebrate tonight with a screening at the Garden Theatre in Winter Garden, Florida. (See https://www.gardentheatre.org/movies/). I first saw the movie on June 25, 1988, at Carmike 8 Cinema in Clarksville, Tennessee. I’ve seen it 15 times on the big screen since. Here’s my interview with Charles Fleischer for the […]
Best films of 2018 so far
When December rolls around, one invariably sees critics taking stabs at top-10 lists. I’m always a bit reticent, as my true “best of the year” list usually doesn’t take its final form until March or April of the following year, after I’ve caught up on foreign films and documentaries. So when some of my fellow […]