Blog

MEGALOPOLIS does not work. MEGALOPOLIS does work.

MEGALOPOLIS contains laughably horrible sequences. MEGALOPOLIS contains filmmaking as good as anything Coppola has ever done.

MEGALOPOLIS takes a left turn (among constant left turns) at the start of its final third that lead this writer to think the movie, which had been wobbling the whole time, had totally come off the potter's wheel.

Then it turned out it still had a few more things to say. And it ended with a shot that...

It may be with some cheek that we write a short(ish) piece on the movie epic-one of cinema's most difficult and rewarding genres.

Where do you start? Where do you end?

We are even more perverse as to leave out some of the highest watermarks-2001, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, The Godfathers Pts 1 & 2-get no mention here (as much as we love them). They're so talked about as to risk becoming white noise.

The movie epic is endangered. It runs the risk of extinction. We can not let that happen. 

Because the movie epic is, in some ways, cinema's cathedrals. When you watch a great one, you...

It's funny what movies become comfort foods.

Who would have known thirteen years later that Tomas Alfredson's dense layered adaptation of John Le Carre's famous spy novel TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY starring a re-energized "I'm here to act!" Gary Oldman would become a go-to re-watchable.

The movie follows...

Fellow movie lovers of the world. Here we are. September 2024. Movies have survived world wars, global pandemics, depressions, fear of nuclear annihilation, television, the internet, streaming...

Screwball comedies are characterized by madcap energy and eccentric characters. They act as musical comedic crescendos that climax in a kind of comedic apocalypse of craziness.

If you love 'em, you love 'em. If you're not on their wavelength, they often strike you as unnatural and head scratching.

For this writer though, very few things beat a great screwball comedy. They're as cinematic as any great movie.

Moviemakers Howard Hawks (TWENTIETH CENTURY, HIS GIRL FRIDAY, MONKEY BUSINESS along with BRINGING UP BABY) and Preston Sturges (SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS, THE MIRACLE AT MORGAN'S CREEK, THE LADY EVE, etc) stand as the twin giants of this subgenre. And their movies have influenced Peter Bogdonovich (WHAT'S UP DOC), the Coen Brothers (RAISING ARIZONA, THE BIG LEBOWSKI), and David O Russell (FLIRTING WITH DISASTER).

The heyday of the screwball comedy era was the 1930's. And Hawks' 1938 BRINGING UP BABY starring megawatt megastars Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant along with an ensemble of hilarious character actors is one of the quicksilver zeniths of that period.

Grant plays zoologist David Huxley who needs just one more bone for the brontosaurus skeleton he's been working on for four years. He also needs to close a one million dollar endowment deal before he gets married to his prim fiance Alice Swallow.

But no sooner does...

No Country For Old Men (2007, adapt & dir by Ethan & Joel Coen, from the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, starring Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones, Kelly MacDonald, Woody Harrelson)

SPECIAL NOTE: This piece inaugurates an occasional series of longer form film pieces. Every now and then, Secret Movie Club will take a deeper dive/look into a movie, moviemaker, aspect of movie culture. There will be more research, trivia, behind the scenes, facts about the work/artist/aspect of cinema culture we’re exploring. Let us know what you think and what you 

It has been seventeen years since the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country For Old Men opened in movie theaters in 2007 and the movie feels like it is gaining in power and importance.

It was hailed as a return to form masterpiece from the get-go by critics. The Coens had just made Intolerable Cruelty (2003) and The Ladykillers (2004) back to back; two movies often considered pretty minor in the Coens’ formidable body of work. 

No Country would go on to win 8 Academy Awards besting Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood at the awards ceremony.

This bloody, unsettling, and, for many first viewers, puzzling movie is also one of the Coens’...

Robert Rossellini is a full blown discovery for this writer. Unprepared for the power and humanism of his war trilogy (ROME, OPEN CITY, PAISAN, GERMANY YEAR ZERO) or the intense spirituality and humor of his THE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS, this writer had been missing a key puzzle piece in the power of cinema.

Part of an informal trilogy starring his then wife, Ingrid Bergman ( that includes STROMBOLI and EUROPA '51) Rossellini's JOURNEY TO ITALY tells the story of conflicted married couple Katherine and Alex Joyce. They have come to Italy to sell a house of Alex's recently deceased Uncle. Alex is British, Katherine is European (Bergman was Swedish but this is never spelled out in the movie). But the vacation and Italy itself has an unnerving effect on the couple. Soon they are bickering, flirting with others, confronting issues in their marriage that work and distraction have papered over. It all boils to a final confrontation across a few days.

JOURNEY TO ITALY is a Martin Scorsese favorite. A huge devotee of Rossellini...

Filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt has been making beautiful, strange, singular heart breaking hilarious animations for almost thirty years now (and he's only 48!!). 

His immediately recognizable style often involves simply drawn characters with a comedic bent who are thrown into absurd, increasingly dark situations. 

As Hertzfeldt has progressed, he has pushed the limits more and more of combining laugh out loud absurdist comedy and increasingly dark, heart breaking, tragic counterpoint. 

In many ways, this storytelling has hit an apotheosis in a series of on-going science fiction episodes titled WORLD OF TOMORROW which he started in 2015. 

Though he has released three episodes, he has implied that the series is open ended and may even reach nine episodes when all is said and done.

WORLD OF TOMORROW, the first episode, focuses on…

Good friend and occasional blog contributor Matt Olsen recommended Hundreds of Beavers to this writer. Matt has an uncanny sense for amazing indie, low budget, hard to see movies that are worth a watch. So this writer took a chance.

What a wild movie.

Hundreds of Beavers, the brain-child of co-writer/director Mike Cheslik and lead actor Ryland Tews, is an absurd comedy about an aspring fur trapper who battles hundreds of beavers in the snowy wilds of Wisconsin. The kicker is that the beavers (and all the forest animals) are either people in huge mascot outfits or puppets.

The movie plays like the indescribable combination of…

How does one puzzle out the value of a $1.8M western-horror film that BOTH shows the limitations of its budget and transcends them with powerful storytelling? But then again, the low budget may be the foundation of the entire effect.

The movie works, in part, because its production tensions translate well to the narrative tensions.

No budget for horses. . .well have some antagonists steal the horses. No budget for special effects? Well. . .muster what budget there is for a few money shots that will turn the audience's stomach. No budget for complicated camera moves ? Well. . .keep the shots workmanlike but effective. Lean into the story, acting, and sound design to carry the load like a group of pack mules who can still cross the desert.

You get the idea. These filmmakers found workarounds.

BONE TOMAHAWK is a movie this writer had been hearing about for years (it was made in 2015) but only just got around to seeing.

It is well worth the watch for those who can tolerate extreme violence and complexity of tone.

The story feels like the bastard child of…

You can find out more about this famous wonderful international film festival for movie lovers by visiting: https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/ospitalita/

The city of Bologna is famous for many reasons. Its food scene ranks among the highest in the world (it’s the home of ragu, tortellini in brado, and many other dishes that make the mouth water). One can argue it’s the first of its kind: the college town, as the University of Bologna is the oldest college on record in Europe. It’s the home of Giorgio Morandi, the incredible still life artist — the great filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini — and the list of things that make Bologna special goes on and on.

Yet something you may not know about Bologna is a magnificent annual event titled: IL CINEMA RITROVATO — a film festival designed for cinephiles. Organized by the Cineteca Bologna, along with many sponsors, the festival programs approximately 480 screenings of rare hidden gems and beloved classics in only two weeks. World-class filmmakers such as Costa-Gavras, Wim Wenders, Marco Bellochio, Damien Chazelle, Alexander Payne, Darren Aronofsky, and Alice Rohrwacher — just to name several that came this year — attended and introduced either…

This blog is part 3 of a three part series on Italian moviemaker Roberto Rosselini’s famous World War II trilogy-Rome, Open City (1945), Paisan (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1948).

It should not be a shock that Germany Year Zero is the most brutal Rossellini movie of his War World II trilogy.

Despite having watching a woman gunned down in the street, a man tortured to death, and a priest executed in Rome, Open City, despite having seen two budding lovers killed and then entire families executed in Paisan, the experience of watching the brutal, unsentimental Germany Year Zero still grabs you.

Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero follows young German boy, Edmund, as he wanders a bombed out post World War II Berlin, trying to find ways to help his struggling family. As so many similar families struggle in the immediate aftermath of the war. Edmund’s father is sick and ailing in bed. His older brother, Karl-Heinz, a German soldier, hides from the police and refuses to help the family for fear of being arrested. His sister Eva flirts with the boundaries of being a call girl, escort, girlfriend to get money, cigarettes, resources for the family.

The movie continues Rossellini’s commitment to showing things movies were not supposed to show. The five or six families…