I must be a terrible grouch…er, Grinch…this season.  I’m not into Christmas movies at all, though I do have a soft spot for A Christmas Story (you can thank or blame me and my former TNT colleagues for the 24 hour ACS marathon stunt which continues to this day, but on a different network).  I also [...]

Yesterday, December 10th, would have been the 67th birthday of talented child actor Tommy Rettig, who might be best known to aging baby boomers as the television Lassie’s first boy owner.  Rettig was one of those screen moppets who didn’t manage to turn a successful acting career as a youngster into their life’s work, but he managed instead [...]

As a little girl I was fascinated by Walt Disney’s animated film Sleeping Beauty, and in fact it started my lifelong love of classical music — the score and songs were based on Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Ballet, of course.  I would have been about four and a half when it came out, and as a [...]

Much of the time around here we’re talking about old things, and dead people, and it felt like a good time to be able to celebrate someone who’s alive, well and doing wonderful work in the movies.  Actor William Fichtner — the face is definitely familiar if perhaps you don’t immediately connect the name — [...]

Not to be necessarily morbid, but I’m thinking we all must have movie death scenes that have stuck in our minds.  Sure, maybe I am a little morbid sometimes, and boy,  darn if I don’t have a special affection for movies with memorable deaths in them.  Maybe memorable isn’t precisely the right word.  How about weird, more [...]

All the world loves a beautiful woman, especially the world of Hollywood.  I suppose we can say that there are actresses…and beautiful women…and sometimes beautiful actresses.  Some of these beautiful women marry beautiful actors, too.  Some of these beautiful women even try their darndest to become serious actresses, but often their looks keep them from [...]

Every so often I shuffle through my box of old Hollywood photos, hoping to find something that will resonate.  Tomorrow, November 7th, will be the 58th anniversary of the day that incomparably beautiful actress Ava Gardner married actor/singer Frank Sinatra.  In fact, the pair wed barely a week after Sinatra’s divorce from his first wife Nancy [...]

Television is crazy about ghosts these days, from the still-popular Ghost Whisperer dramatic series — no, she doesn’t tame ghosts, like the The Horse Whisperer or the Dog Whisperer do their respective subjects, but she does give them a stern talking to — to the several series such as Ghost Hunters featuring paranormal investigators poking around [...]

Gee, but the 1960s seem like a really long time ago.  Some…many…of our readers were probably not even born then, but it was, by everyone’s account, an amazing decade.  Movie stars were MOVIE STARS, bigger than life and still held shakily aloft on pedestals shored up by a more discreet press and slightly more genteel [...]