movies

Still funny after all these years

Featured image Lloyd Billingsley draws on Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971) to trace the outline of a mania — the mania of Democrat orthodoxy. I was thinking about Bananas over the weekend as I revisited Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) and reread Kenneth Lynn’s (great) Charlie Chaplin and His Times. Early in Bananas Allen pays tribute to Chaplin and Modern Times. Allen plays Fielding Mellish, a “research tester” for General Equipment. In the »

Conservatism, Animal-Style

Featured image Whenever I am down in the LA area, as I am today, my mind runs to ordering French fries “animal style” from In-n-Out burgers. (IYKYK.) But today, opening up the Washington Post, I discover the origins of a possible new sect of conservatism: Animal-House conservatives, who naturally do things “animal-style.” Yes, the Post really does suggest that the 1978 comedy blockbuster Animal House bears some responsibility for the Reagan era »

Top Gun, Indeed

Featured image Check out this short video that Tom Cruise made to promote his two most recent films, Top Gun: Maverick and the current Mission Impossible, and to thank movie fans for their business: A special message from the set of #MissionImpossible @MissionFilm pic.twitter.com/sfnWWluLyl — Tom Cruise (@TomCruise) December 18, 2022 Say what you will about the man, he’s got guts. »

My Son Hunter

Featured image I shelled out $21 to buy Breitbart’s new film, My Son Hunter. It is the story of the Biden crime family, as documented on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, brought to life. It is not a documentary; rather the film is a fictionalized version of the story. As Gina Carano, playing a Secret Service agent, says at the beginning: “This is not a true story…except for all the facts.” So, how »

The horror! Spanish actor plays a Cuban-American

Featured image “Being the Ricardos” is a film about a week in the life of the cast of “I Love Lucy.” With so many sports events cancelled due to the Wuhan coronavirus, I watched this movie on Amazon Prime last week. The plot centers around (1) the marital problems of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and (2) the turmoil stemming from reports that Ball once registered to vote as a Communist. There’s »

Yaphet Kotto, RIP

Featured image I learned today from the Power Line picks that Yaphet Kotto has died. I learned from the obituary that Scott (I assume) linked to that Kotto was Jewish. I had no idea. Kotto wasn’t a convert to Judaism. According to ManishTana, a website run by an Orthodox rabbi, Kotto’s father immigrated to the U.S. from Cameroon in the 1920s as an observant Jew who could speak Hebrew. Kotto reportedly said »

Hillbilly Elegy, the movie

Featured image Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance is one the most worthwhile books I’ve read in recent years. It’s a riveting account of Vance’s family as it moved from the hills of Kentucky to an Ohio steel town — Middletown — where it struggled to fulfill some semblance of the American Dream. Hillbilly Elegy is also a sociological study of Middletown and its “hill” population. The story had special resonance for me »

Amazon thanks me…

Featured image I have struggled to get my review of the Amanda Milius documentary The Plot Against the President posted on Amazon. This is my review: This is a documentary based on one of the best books written about the Russia hoax. It does a good job telling the story and giving it dramatic shape. It may be the closest we come to the administration of justice in the biggest scandal in »

The Plot Against the President: My rejected Amazon review

Featured image It is a tremendous disappointment that we have had no accounting for the greatest scandal by far in American political history. What we have are a few excellent books about it and, now, a documentary based on one of the books. Lee Smith is the author of The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in US History. The book »

An Alain Delon festival

Featured image Today, TCM will be showing a series of movies starring Alain Delon, the French film star. I can recommend two of them — Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and Le Samouraï (1967). I don’t believe I’ve seen the other movies. Rocco and His Brothers is an Italian epic about a family from Southern Italy trying to survive in post-war Milan. Directed by Luchino Visconti, it runs more than three hours, »

“Be black, baby”

Featured image Brian De Palma is an acclaimed movie director, and has been for more than 50 years. His best known films include “Carrie,” “Dressed to Kill,” “Scarface,” and “The Untouchables.” De Palma first came to attention with “Greetings” (1968). It starred Robert De Niro as a young man trying to avoid the draft. De Palma followed up “Greetings” with “Hi Mom!” (1970), in which De Niro plays the same character. This »

Japanese movies, the essentials

Featured image I hope some of our readers followed Scott’s recommendation and watched or taped a few of the Akira Kurosawa films that TCM showed yesterday. I watched High and Low for the first time and loved it. Here are a few more recommendations for those interested in Japanese films from the Kurosawa era: Ikiru: TCM didn’t show this movie, but it’s one of my favorite Kurosawa films. Ikiru is a scathing »

A fair shake for “Parasite”

Featured image A few years ago, I praised contemporary South Korean film making. The two movies I found most worth mentioning were (1) “The Age of Shadows,” a police/espionage thriller set in World War II during the Japanese occupation and (2) “The Merciless,” a cross between “The Departed” and “White Heat” with a little bit of “Pulp Fiction” thrown in at the beginning. Now, the American filmgoing public is in on the »

Donald Trump, “Home Alone 2,” and Canada

Featured image Did you know that Donald Trump had a cameo role in the movie “Home Alone Two?” I didn’t. This fact would be nothing more than a bit of trivia and a source of pride for the president except that when the Canadian television company CBC aired the movie this week, the Trump cameo did not appear. Ironically, the president had just discussed his role in the movie with overseas U.S. »

The strange case of Carlson v. Kelly

Featured image Roger Ailes might have gotten a kick out of this report from the Washington Post. Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly are locked in a proxy war over, in effect, which of the two women merits top billing in “Bombshell,” the movie about Ailes’s downfall at Fox News. (I say “proxy war” because the battle is being waged by their friends). The Post’s Paul Fahri reports: There’s an argument brewing over »

Iconic beauty dies

Featured image Sometime in 1969, John Hinderaker and I fell in love with the same woman. Her name was Anna. Unfortunately, Anna was already married, and for the second time. Previously, she had been the wife of Jean Luc Godard, the French film director in whose movies Anna beguiled us. Anna Karina died last week at the age of 79. Her artistic legacy includes not just the Godard films — such as »

No Safe Spaces: See It!

Featured image No Safe Spaces is a terrific documentary about the Left’s assault on free speech. It stars Dennis Prager and Adam Corolla, and is directed by my friend Justin Folk. My organization, Center of the American Experiment, held a pre-screening of the film in Minneapolis last Summer. We sold out a 368-seat theater and the movie got a great reception. I wrote about the event here. Having seen No Safe Spaces, »