By that I mean I’m mad at the Oscars.  More to the point, I hate them.  And I hate that you still love the Oscars even though they take and they take and they give nothing back.  And I want to break you guys up.  And the way I plan to do that is to [...]

Movie lovers are always gassing on about the end of things.  Oh, how we love to mourn!  Up in Canada, the horror-hound’s TV getaway, Scream, morphed quietly and with little fanfare last September into Dusk.  Billed as “the supernatural, thriller and suspense channel,” Dusk is a gore-free zone that sounds suspiciously like a crust thrown [...]

Since my wife and I started a family within the past five years, I’ve become acutely attuned to the performances of child actors in movies and on TV.  Although I was born a softie, I find myself tearing up a lot more now as a father of two… and not just during scenes of sadness [...]

I grew up singing and listening to my family sing.  We weren’t show folk or carnies.  My parents were ex-military (they had in fact met and married in the Air Force) and worked for the better part of my formative years as school teachers.  I was the only actor in the family tree but I [...]

While watching Universal’s hopelessly misconceived (but still enjoyable) THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. RX (1942) the other night, I was struck by how valuable an asset was Mantan Moreland. 

Universal Studios was the headquarters for horror during the 1930s and 40s, following the one-two punch of Tod Browning’s DRACULA and James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN in 1931.  The rival studios didn’t try to beat Universal at cranking out the monster pictures but most of them gave the genre a shot once horror became, in the eyes [...]

We all have our seminal texts.  These are the books that made us who we are, that are hard-wired to our psyches, whose very pages float like paper sailboats in the salty brine of our DNA.  At the far end of my life, I’d rate Don Whitehead’s THE FBI STORY (a sanitized “adapted for young [...]

Look deep into the heart of a true cinephile and you’ll find not only a long list of movies he or she is dying to see and hasn’t but another equally long, if not longer, list of movies he or she is dying to see that were never made. 

The great thing about Christmas is that it’s yours to do with whatever you like.  Some people just can’t abide the holidays and my heart goes out to them.  I understand.  I’m an atheist, a secular humanist, a realist, at times even a cynic.  I get how galling the prefab mirth and canned bonhomie can [...]