The second big Christmas Carol remake of the season, this one being modernized, musicalized, and Will Ferrell/Ryan Reynolds-ized.
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CHAPTER 9: Ford’s Fractured Families
The decade from 1940 through 1950 found John Ford often returning to the theme of the family under pressure, torn apart, reconciled, or even completely fabricated (yet ultimately cohering into something real). Three of these pictures-The Long Voyage Home (1940), Three Godfathers (1948), and Rio Grande (1950)-serve as fascinating sketchbooks for themes Ford would fully develop in masterpieces that shortly followed. And Rio Grande is itself a masterpiece that sets up an even bigger masterpiece (The Quiet Man).
John Ford was always coming back to questions of…
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We appreciate three John Ford silent movies of the 1920’s-The Iron Horse, Three Bad Men, and Upstream which point to the poetic mastery Ford will achieve in the late 1930’s and beyond. We also look with jealousy on an era where a movie director could hone their craft across 80+ movies before really grabbing the spotlight.
It’s instructive (and somewhat sobering) to realize that John Ford was already considered a veteran director of 12+ years before the sound era arrived. And while his 1924 epic of the construction of the transcontinental railroad The Iron Horse was a huge blockbuster that catapulted Ford to top of the director pack, he still was 11 years away from…
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After watching all of those versions of A Christmas Carol last December, you’d think I wouldn’t be able to bear watching this old saw again this year, but you’d be wrong! I love this story, and it can be done so many ways, there is no reason for me not to be thrilled about a new version. And this year, we have two!
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After watching all of those versions of A Christmas Carol last December, you’d think I wouldn’t be able to bear watching this old saw one more time, but you’d be wrong! I love this story, and it can be done so many ways, there is no reason for me not to be thrilled about a new version. And this year, we have two! But they will have to wait for next week, because this week we have one of the classics that I meant to get to last year, but ran out of time: the Patrick Stewart version.
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I saw the trailer for Violent Night a couple of months ago, and it looked so funny and so tight that it really seemed like a fake trailer, and that it probably wouldn’t be improved by being two hours longer, but I was willing to give it a shot.
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Hi all, Connor Lloyd Crews here. On our pod this week – SMC Pod #128: Movie Posters – we mention a heckuva lotta posters. I present them here with minimal comments for your perusal. Enjoy!
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There is not a lot more pleasurable than an all-star mystery movie. They used to do these a lot in the 1970s and ‘80s, like Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, The Mirror Crack’d, and Evil Under the Sun, or comedically with The Cheap Detective, Clue, and Murder by Death.
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This film was another situation where I saw the trailer and thought, Ralph Fiennes? Anya Taylor-Joy? High end restaurant? Tasting menu? Did they make this film for me?
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At the time of its original release in 1981, there had never been a movie like Roar, which is an impressive feat considering the roughly eighty years of film history before it. Even more impressive is that there hasn’t been a movie like it since. Going further, there will never be another movie like it. (Discounting any descent into a Mad Max-like anarchic dystopia.)
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This is my favourite way to see a film, knowing nothing at all about it, only that it was good. Or so I was lead to believe.
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I had originally intended this post to be about the current film, Tár, starring Cate Blanchett and written and directed by Todd Field but I couldn’t answer a question about it for myself. The question is not “Is this film any good?” The film, I’m happy to report, is definitely and without question any good.
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