Moviegoers everywhere understand the concept of shared cinema.  Even if they don’t know it as a topic of conversation or classroom discussion, they understand that a part of the thrill of seeing a new movie is seeing it on opening weekend with a crowd.  Well, at least most young moviegoers.  I myself prefer a quiet […]

Hollywood has long been in love with itself.  It has also loathed itself in equal share.  It’s the all-time Hollywood love/hate relationship and it’s with itself.  They even make movies in Hollywood about how great Hollywood is and movies about how bad it is, too.  The movies about how bad it is tend to win […]

When a movie is made, that is, the actual dates in time in which the movie is completed,  is often of little value to the plot.  A story with well drawn characters may or may not be much affected by what year it takes place in anymore than where.  Many movies of all genres have […]

I never saw the transformation Judy Garland, Roddy McDowall or Elizabeth Taylor made from child actor to adult star.   Or Mickey Rooney.  Or Dean Stockwell.  Or any child actor who successfully moved on to a movie career as an adult before 1980 because to me, I saw it happen all at once.  I might […]

Like most genres of film, Science Fiction has many sub-genres within a one all-inclusive umbrella but there’s the odd, subtextual mix of the fun and the disturbing in almost all of it.   No matter how fun it may be to watch, just under the surface or perhaps to the side of the screen, in […]

I watched the documentary Side by Side over the weekend and enjoyed it very much (it was mentioned here at the Morlocks about three months ago when Morlock Keelsetter did a post, The Year in Documentaries, assessing the best non-fiction had to offer for the year, outside of the short list created by the Academy to […]

2013 marks the 75th anniversary of Anatole Litvak’s The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, starring Edward G. Robinson, Claire Trevor and Humphrey Bogart.  Since no one else will celebrate it, I will.  Why?  Well, for starters, did you see that title?  No one has character names like that anymore nor are they described as amazing unless they’re […]

Each year the Oscars ignite arguments between movie lovers between what did win and what didn’t win, what could have won and what should have won.  And more often than not, by the very next year, they’re all forgotten.  Since the Oscars don’t exactly measure true quality, most movie lovers take the whole dog and […]

One thing I like to imagine when thinking about a film I really enjoy is what the side characters do in their spare time, that is, when they’re not busy propelling the story of the main character before us.   And I don’t mean what are they doing in this particular scene when they’re off-camera, […]