A library in Colorado Springs recently purged its collection of short 16mm children’s films. Thanks to the alert eye of a librarian on my campus these have been rescued and I plan to screen some of them tonight. It will be part of a family-friendly 4th of July weekend screening that I’m putting on in [...]

Last Mother’s Day I wrote a piece titled Modern Movie-Going Punishments. It got a big response. Clearly, a lot of people have had to deal with negative experiences when going out to see movies on the big screen. Readers also added to the list of rude behaviors, two of which we felt obliged to add [...]

I’m in the process of assembling a spreadsheet of films that I’d like to bring to my fall calendar program. As an exhibitor, I wish I could give all (or, at least, most or many) of these films a home. But as the market place keeps shrinking the theatrical windows, and as V.O.D. becomes more [...]

I spent this morning watching a compilation DVD that was sent to me by filmmaker/artist/musician Cory McAbee. It was titled “TnT” (which stands for Titles and Trailers), and it was the focus of a presentation he did a few months ago for the UnionDocs Collaborative in Brooklyn in conjunction with Rooftop Films (whose byline is: [...]

Today is the second Sunday in May. Mother’s Day. As I’ve had the Sunday shift for several years now I’ve already been able to write on the ways my mom contributed to my passion for cinema during my early years. (For further Mother’s Day homages look no further than R.H. Smith’s recent post.) Mother’s Day [...]

The film series I program celebrated its 70th year anniversary last night with a concert film matinee from 1988, followed by a musician-studded film that was retooled last year, all of which was capped off with two live concerts in a building that was once an 800-seat film theater smack in the middle of downtown. [...]

In my last post I wrapped up my interview with Alex Cox by talking a bit about John Carpenter’s They Live (1988). Alex said: “They Live holds up for the first 45 minutes, and then there’s this long wrestling match between Roddy Piper and Keith David, and it never recovers. But those first 45 minutes [...]

In my last blog post I transcribed the first half of an informal interview I had with Repo Man director Alex Cox a couple weeks ago. In this second half of that interview we talk about movies he’d select for TCM if he were a guest programmer, what it’s like to work on the other [...]

Alex Cox was born in Liverpool and later moved to the U.S. and went on to direct some of the most iconoclastic arthouse films of my youth with titles like Repo Man, Sid and Nancy, Straight to Hell, and Walker. That was the eighties. Then came the nineties and I was still being amazed by [...]