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One Shot Ross
Some men like to forget about their past. Start all over, grow a Sam Elliot mustache and drink in the corner of the bar while saying things like “I don’t like to talk about San Diego.” Not I, however. I, on the other hand, am always reminded of my past each time I go into […]
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Tex Avery Screwball Classics
I was a weird kid. This statement should not be socking to regular readers of this column. Growing up I adored Warner Brothers cartoons, and I happened to notice the names of the directors, which is something I’d argue most 10-year-olds in 1995 didn’t care about. As I began to pick up on the styles […]
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The Rabbit Hole
Have you ever fallen down an internet rabbit hole? You innocently look up one topic on the internet, then you click a link, then you click another link, and soon an hour has gone by and you’ve looked at every single piece of Dick Van Dyke fan art on Etsy. These rabbit hole rides don’t […]
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Fantastic Worlds of Karel Zeman
Though my movie shelves are often overflowing, though I love the classic era with a burning passion, I am by no means an expert on the whole darn thing. World Cinema is an area that is something of a blindspot to me, and the win of Best Picture by Korean film “Parasite” should serve to […]
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One Man’s Dream
The other night at dinner, my non-existent son, Lemuel, was too preoccupied with doing that flossing dance than he was eating the fine meal my also non-existent wife, Sheila, had made. I looked at the boy and said: “Son if you eat all your broccoli, you can play a Fortnite.” The flossing stopped, the eating […]
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Magnificent Obsession
Director Douglas Sirk is best known for a string of beautiful looking Melodramas he made at Universal Studios during the mid to late 1950s, two of his films “All that Heaven Allows” and “Magnificent Obsession” both helped launch Rock Hudson to stardom, and both are available on blu-ray from The Criterion Collection, the latter of […]
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Thin Manned Smiths Named Pete
There are certain times when I speak to you about new releases from Warner Archive that I find myself particularly geeked. Which is to not say I’m not always enthusiastic when speaking about their titles, but sometimes they put out something that hits right in the target of my movie love, and or is something […]
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Rumination on Wellsville
In the weeks following the death of my father, I’ve spent a lot of time re-watching my favorite “comfort food” TV. Many of these are shows I grew up watching as a kid on Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite. I’ve been binging “The Bob Newhart Show” and thinking about how wonderfully brilliant that series is, […]
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Klute
By the early 1970s, Hollywood—and America—was changing. The production code, that set of rules placed in the 1930s that told movie studios what they could, and couldn’t, show on screen had crumbled. Audiences were ready for Hollywood to grow up, as the late 1960s faded into the early 1970s, the innocence that had existed in […]
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Tracking Notification
Do you ever get excited when you receive an email that tells you “your package has shipped?” When I was a kid, and before the existence of eBay, packages showing up at the house were few and far between. I always thought, in that way that kids look at the adult world, that a package […]
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A Weekend Away
I am not, by nature, one of those types who thinks that men need to get away to the woods for a “get in touch with your primitive side” retreat. One of those ridiculous things were men who have more income than I set things on fire in a desperate attempt to battle their insecurity. […]
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Gaslight
Are you familiar with the term “gaslighting?” The term is given to a type of psychological abuse where the victim is purposely and gradually manipulated into questioning their own reality. The moniker comes from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 English stage play “Gas Light,” in which a young woman is purposefully duped into questioning her own sanity. […]
