Beginning on July 9th, the Film Society at Lincoln Center in NYC will be mounting their misleadingly titled “Complete Clint Eastwood” series, which will run all the films he directed, but only a select few of his key acting turns (it’s a superb program regardless). It’s in honor of his 80th birthday, which our own Susan Doll celebrated a few months back. With Clint well represented on home video, it’s easy for anyone outside NYC to curate their own Eastwood retrospective, and one that I suggest deserves re-evaluation is his 1982 spy thriller, Firefox (available on Netflix Instant). His entire early 80s output, from Bronco Billy (1980, also on Netflix Instant) through Sudden Impact (1983), is extraordinary and relatively forgotten, but Firefox, perhaps due to its bizarre sci-fi trappings, has been judged harshly and dumped into the late-night cable dustbin.

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I first heard of hard-boiled writer Jim Thompson around 1990 when his books were suddenly the hottest properties in Hollywood. That year, The Grifters and After Dark, My Sweet were both adapted for the big screen, which subsequently cast a spotlight on director Maggie Greenwald’s 1989 indie version of The Kill-Off. Other Thompson novels were quickly optioned or re-optioned, though, like all trends in Hollywood, the vogue for his work quickly faded, and these projects never materialized. The next interpretation of one of his novels came four years later in the form of a weak remake of The Getaway mounted as a vehicle for married stars Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. My love of hard-boiled fiction combined with my admiration for the movie interpretations of The Grifters and After Dark, My Sweet prompted me to read a few novels by the writer, whose heart was surely filled with darkness. Despite the sick, unlikable characters, the violent deaths described in graphic detail, and the harsh, bitter take on small-town America, I enjoyed his writing immensely. I liked his sparse, take-no-prisoners writing style and his experimentations with narrative point of view.

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She was born a century ago, on July 4, 1910, and what a thrill it is to be able to wish actress Gloria Stuart a Happy 100th Birthday!  What a milestone for Ms. Stuart, and how lucky we are to have her with us.  We all remember her sort-of Cinderella “Only in Hollywood” story — how, after a busy movie career in the 1930s and early 1940s, she more-or-less retired from the screen, after marrying screenwriter Arthur Sheekman.  Raising a family, work for WWII causes, painting and other artistic pursuits occupied her time away from her acting career, but after nearly forty years absent from the screen she began to appear again in movies and television.  Of course, it was her 1997 role as the older version of Kate Winslet’s character Rose in director James Cameron’s mega-hit Titanic which catapulted her into the spotlight again, a place she’s occupied with grace and class, making her an audience favorite all over again.

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Some movies play on in your memory, long after the viewing. But it isn’t always because of the story, the actors or the film’s cumulative impact. Sometimes it could simply be a music cue or the end credits music or the opening theme that resonate in your brain for years, even when the rest of it evaporates into memory’s mist.      READ MORE

Last week I talked a bit about apocalyptic disaster movies that, generally speaking, build up to and then pull back from destroying the entire world, leaving humanity decimated in the final frames but huggy and hopeful.  After catching up with THE ROAD (2009), John Hillcoat’s film adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Cormac McCarthy, I’m going to angle the discussion to movies that do not build up to the end or near-end of the world but rather use that grim conceit as a starting point for stories about families attempting to keep it together when everything around them has fallen apart. READ MORE

Last weekend I had the opportunity to attend The Sacramento Mid-Century Modern Home Tour. The focus of the event was on interior and exterior home design from the ’50s and ’60s but there were also plenty of other distractions to keep attendees busy such as a classic car show and a small theater was set up to show Scopitone films.

Scopitone (pronounced scop-a-tone) was the name given to a new kind of coin-operated film-jukebox that was introduced in France in 1960 by the French company Compagnie d’Applications Mecaniques à Electronique au Cinéma et à Atomistique (CAMECA). These film-jukeboxes looked a lot like the typical jukeboxes that became popular in the ’40s and ’50s but the Scopitone machines featured large screens that sat on top of the jukebox and played 16mm films. These 2-4 minute long Scopitone shorts offered viewers a new kind of audio-visual experience that allowed them to see and hear their favorite performers. Scopitone films are often referred to as the original “music videos” and for good reason. Just like the modern music videos that became popular in the ’80s thanks to television outlets like MTV; Scopitone films were also created to promote entertainers and sell records.

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