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Bombast #48
This week Time Out New York released its list of the 100 Best movies shot in New York. All the Internet loves a list, and as such things go it’s well done, but while cycling through it I couldn’t help...
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Bombast #49
Reading my François Mauriac by guttering candlelight, I re-encountered the following, from the 1962 essay collection Cain, Where is Your Brother?: “A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place...
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Bombast #50
This week has been dominated by the long-spreading shadow preceding the anticipated touch-down of Christopher Nolan’s latest Batman opus. Has there been such a brouhaha over the theater since the O.P....
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Bombast #51
It’s now just over a week since James Eagan Holmes opened fire at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, and time enough has passed to collate the reactions. For starters,...
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Bombast #52
NEWS ON THE MARCH! This week the venerable UK film mag Sight & Sound released its seventh “Greatest Films of All Time” survey, the results of which have been unveiled every decade since 1952. The...
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Bombast #53
“I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror” said Carson McCullers of Columbus, Georgia—but I am afraid that I actually rather enjoy returning to Cincinnati, Ohio. I am particularly fond...
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Bombast #54
Prompted by the death of Gore Vidal, which was subject of this column two weeks prior, I finally picked up a copy of Screening History last week, the author’s sole work built around—I cannot say...
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Bombast #55
The Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles’s traditionally blue-collar South Bay connects San Pedro on the West side to Terminal Island and Long Beach on the East. The area is well-represented in motion...
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Bombast #56
It so happened that I had re-watched Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, as I am wont to do about once a year, the night before the news of the Republican National Convention’s surprise guest speaker leaked....
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Bombast #57
Once upon re-watching The Thin Man (1934), I made a point of counting the martinis that William Powell’s Nick Charles slung back during a single party scene. I can’t remember the exact total, but it...
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Bombast #59
“Yesterday had been summer in the city, the end of summer stale and jaded, with a dejection in the air that dragged like an old skirt in the gutter.” So begins one of my favorite works of fantasy...
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Bombast #60
Just now I watched the reconvened NFL referees give every last chance of victory to the “Cleveland Browns” expansion team, which nevertheless earnestly lost its fourth straight game of the still-young...
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Bombast #61
I have been working on a list of things whose presence alone can render a movie at least watchable. One of them is a character dashing a salt shaker into a mug of beer. Other examples include: *Maps...
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Bombast #62
Can you smell the cannonades? A long-fomenting revolution is underway! Movies are going to be fun again! Was the Lexington moment when Dan Kois pushed away a steaming plateful of cultural...
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Bombast #63
If you want to develop a schizophrenic attitude about the value of a dollar, I suggest dividing your adolescent listening time between finger-wagging punk/hardcore music, and licentious, make-it-rain...
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Bombast #64
Last Saturday, October 20th, I fulfilled a dream that began when I was a wee 12-year-old watching reruns of NBC-TV’s CPO Sharkey on the infant Comedy Central: I finally saw national treasure Donald...
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Bombast #65
This week, the world of film criticism was rocked by some unexpected news. I am referring, of course, to Gene Shalit’s encounter with a utility pole in Lenox, Massachusetts. I wish the best of luck to...
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Bombast #97
There is unquestionably a future for movies, but it’s unclear if the form that movies will take in this future will resemble anything like the form they’ve taken in the last century. Steven Soderbergh...
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Bombast #98
When in Saugerties, Ulster County, New York state, be sure to visit the Orpheum Theatre. Reading comments in the invaluable cinematreasures.org website, I have learned that the Orpheum has perhaps a...
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Bombast #99
The first time I watched The Secret of NIMH, if my memory serves, was in the break room at La Petite France, in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, where I’d been stowed while waiting for my mother’s...
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