TriBeCa Diaries 2: The first day

It's a thrill, being on this side of the festival operations. As a fully accredited press person at the TFF, I'm sitting here writing this entry not in my chaotic, book-and-DVD-strewn apartment in Brooklyn, but in the swanky press office here in the East Village. Nice. And much different than the homey but low-budget amenities we offered at the Dahlonega Film Festival when I was its

TriBeCa Diaries 1: The Universe of Keith Haring

I'm going to take a break from reviewing old favorites for a bit and concentrate on the experiences in store for me at the TriBeCa Film Festival taking place on the Lower East Side of Manhattan April 23 through May 4. In addition to being fully accredited as a member of the press (as the Film Correspondent for The Latest Show on Earth--see it at www.downtowntv.com or host Joe Hendel's

Film #40: Vampyr

Carl Th. Dreyer’s hallucinatory 1932 Danish masterpiece Vampyr has a unique creepiness all its own. It’s easy to see where some present-day filmmakers (chief among them David Lynch) got some of their ideas once you experience this moody trek through Cortenpierre, where vampire hunter David Grey (Baron Nicholas De Gunzberg, acting under the alias Julien West) has stumbled upon an atmosphere

Side Orders #1

Side Orders is going to be a regular column devoted to three or four little scenes from various movies, with the occasional video, short, commercial, and trailer popping up. Unlike my reviews, which can be long, I will brief in these pieces. They're designed for me to write quickly so you can read 'em quickly. Anyway, here we go: I first wanted to feature a series of trailers that I liked, but

Film #39: Full Metal Jacket

Maybe it's bizarre to start this review off with such an observation, but the problem with Oliver Stone's pre-emptive achievement with 1986's Platoon lay in that it, in effect, was Stone's (but perhaps not Hollywood's) simple way of glitzing over the true state of affairs during the Vietnam conflict, all in the name of good, clean, All-American storytelling. Stone's musculature was admirable;

Movie Time! Movie Time!

When I see the bits of long-lost film I've included in this post below, I feel the adrenaline rush through my body full-force. In the 1970s and 80s, these little animated films would always be my intro to a new cinematic experience (even if a lot of the time it was via television). I love the graphics for these things--bright, sparkly, Vegas-y, space-agey (I, of course, especially like the ABC

Film #38: Precious Images

If I'm on this shorts kick, I thought, what better short to include on a movie-themed website than Precious Images. Originally created by Chuck Workman for the Directors Guild of America in 1982, this awe-inspiring montage of the greatest moments in cinema history is downright riveting, especially for film junkies who will inevitably try and name all the movies sampled here. Give it up, guys--

Film #37: The Tell-Tale Heart

Stephen Bosustow's UPA Films had a juggernaut of a run back in the 1950s. From 1949 to 1957, this producer was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, winning three of them (one year he was nominated for all three awards in his category). Given the short time period, this surely must be a record. Not even Meryl Streep could get these numbers. During this time, UPA adapted Dr. Seuss's Gerald

Film #36: Frank Film

I'm so excited, my heart is racing! This is the fifth in a series of short films I'm featuring on filmicability. I just got my newest entry off of YouTube, and it's Frank Mouris's Academy Award-winning animated biography Frank Film (his wife Caroline Mouris gets credit on IMDB as a co-director, by the way). This is one of my favorite bits of animation ever, and certainly in the running for my

Film #35: The Critic

This is the fourth in a series of posts devoted to some of my favorite shorts. This one is popularly attributed to Mel Brooks, who came up with the concept and the narration. But it's a film by Ernest Pintoff, and I understand when he took home the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1963, it caused a rift between them. Well, Mel got his Oscar five years later for The Producers, so I would think

Film #34: Quasi at the Quackadero

Yet another short I like (look at the two others below) is by Sally Cruickshank. Titled Quasi at the Quackadero, it's the closest that cartoons have come to replicating the feel of underground comix. The colorful, even trippy animation coupled with the wonderful voice work (I love Anita's nasal whine) captivated me when I first saw this on the big screen at the Rhodes Theater in Atlanta. I

Film #33: Special Delivery

This cartoon, by John Weldon and Eunice Macauley, is one of the funniest bits of animation I have ever seen. Everything works together: the soapy organ music, the inventive scripting, the sardonic narration, and the fun colored-pencil animation style. I saw this on HBO in the 1980s, not long after it took home an Oscar in 1978 for Best Animated Short. I remember being slightly shocked at the

Film #32: Timepiece

Jim Henson's Timepiece was Oscar-nominated for Best Live Action Short in 1965. I saw this unusual pre-Sesame Street short on HBO in the early 1980s and have remembered it ever since as one of the strangest moments I ever had watching a film--such a bizarre notion, that "Kermit" is behind all this madness. I still am not sure what Timepiece is all about, except to say that it explores beats,

Film #31: Titus

After mounting such grand Broadway productions as the acclaimed The Lion King, director Julie Taymor was seen as a natural to make the leap over to movies. Her first film, Titus, proved right those willing to take a chance on her. While the movie's extraordinary design suffers from the scale-down to television, Titus -- one of Shakespeare's most maligned plays -- now crackles as a most

Film #30: Electra Glide in Blue

It's a strange feeling to write about Robert Blake movies now, after so much has happened to him in his personal life. But, all that aside, if you think about it, Blake had a long and fascinating career in movies. Under his real name Mickey Gubutosi, he was Mickey in Hal Roach's Our Gang series of short films. He went on to play Little Beaver, the Native American sidekick to Red Ryder (Bill

Film #29: Inside Moves

I'll never forget catching Inside Moves on cable back in the early 80s. It was like finding buried treasure, it really was. This 1980 film has now been almost totally forgotten--it's not even on DVD. But if you ever get a chance to see it, and have a prediliction for the sentimental, the beguiling, the intelligent, the well-crafted film, then you will love it as much as I did. Richard

Film #28: Point of Order!

Anybody who saw George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck and was interested in learning more about dirty ol' Joe McCarthy should rent Emile de Antonio's 1963 documentary Point of Order! Cut from hours of old kinescopes of the 1953 Army hearings that destroyed the red-baiting senator and his evil minion/lawyer Roy Cohn, Point of Order! is one of the greatest historical documents ever put to film

Film #27: My Best Fiend

Werner Herzog's My Best Fiend chronicles the masterful German director's unbelievably volatile relationship with the late actor Klaus Kinski, whom he'd known and worked with for three decades. Before this film hit theaters in 1999, stories of these two massive megalomaniacs locking horns on troubled sets were already part of filmmaking folklore, thanks largely to Les Blank's landmark 1982

Film #26: My Bodyguard

Dave Grusin's jazzy, string-flecked score hits me first every time I see My Bodyguard. It takes me back to 1980 instantly and I am happy for it. It's bouncy, joyful, mopey, and erudite. It exemplifies Chicago--where this movie was filmed--all in a few bars. In fact, the only things that remind me of Chicago more than My Bodyguard are John Hughes movies, The Bob Newhart Show, and...Chicago.

Film #25: The Incredible Melting Man

The Incredible Melting Man is one of those "good bad-movies" that people with a taste for irony or simply with a lot of time on their hands seem to love. I have a lot of these guilty pleasures way on down my extensive list of favorites, but I find as I get older, I have less time for things that suck. But this movie--this one was an event I'll always remember from my childhood,so I guess I

Film #24: Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)

If you're looking for the greatest car chase movie in history, I’ve got it. It’s not The Fast and the Furious, or Bullitt, or The French Connection, or The Italian Job or The Seven-Ups. And it’s not the crappy Nicholas Cage remake that bears this movie’s title. It’s H.B. Halicki’s 1974 drive-in masterpiece Gone in 60 Seconds. The title refers to the time it takes for this movie’s thieving

Film #23: American Movie

It’s hard to make a movie. Think of it like building a car engine. You have to get all these parts, big and little, and fit them all together until the thing runs. Movies are also machines, and they have essential elements that become small when seen as part of the whole. The art direction, the catering, the casting, the loading of the camera…without any of these and many more elements, the

Film #22: The Reflecting Skin

This grotesque and downbeat destruction-of-innocence story has Jeremy Cooper playing Seth, a Midwestern ‘50s-era boy whose less-than-stellar upbringing by his pedophile father and mentally diseased mother results in his decidedly off-kilter worldview. Among his fears and delusions are that the pale redhead down the road is a vampire and that the withered fetus he finds in a barn is the

Film #21: Gregory's Girl

Scottish filmmaker Bill Forsyth specializes in what I call "Saturday Afternoon Movies." You know how you feel on a Saturday afternoon...as if everything is in store for you, as if the air is cleaner than the days before, excitement is flooding your veins and all your stresses have dissipated into the past? Most of Forsyth's films make you feel like that, even on non-Saturdays. But catch them