By John H. Foote (***) Nominated for ten Academy Awards, Gangs of New York was thought to be the film that was finally going to land Martin Scorsese his long-overdue Academy Award for Best Director. Often nominated for films such as Raging Bull (1980) and Goodfellas (1990), the most gifted American director of his time…
By Craig Leask Who doesn’t like a good old black and white monster movie, especially around Halloween? My other half and I pull them out each year to help us get in the mood for the annual night of haunts. I guess they’re all somewhat simplistic today, but they really are a weird kind of…
By Alan Hurst The 1930’s were a heyday for comedy films. Other decades may have owned other genres, but the world needed – and wanted – to laugh during a decade of intense depression, poverty, and the slowly simmering build up to World War II. Comedy was the great escape. Gangster films also flourished, as…
By John H. Foote (*) Just four years after his film Chariots of Fire (1981) stunned Hollywood by winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, besting the superior Reds (1981), Hugh Hudson delivered this mess in December 1985. Touted as a massive epic about the American Revolutionary War, the film was expected to be an…
By John H. Foote (****) “Now I want you to remember, no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” – General George S. Patton (George C. Scott in Patton) The United States military believed having a General as dangerous…
By John H. Foote “I’m a dying man…..afraid of the dark.” – JB Books (John Wayne) Ironically the last time John Wayne was on screen he portrayed a gunfighter dying of cancer while he himself was being ravaged by the disease. Co-stars Ron Howard and James Stewart watched as Wayne gulped oxygen between takes, struggled…
By John H. Foote (***) Why was it so disliked? Why was the film held in such blazing contempt? Why was Actor Brandon Routh, who I quite liked, so mercifully crucified? Why did it fail, miserably, at the box office? Why is John H. Foote, Captain Anti-Superhero writing about this film at all? To answer…
By Alan Hurst I will admit to being star struck on the rare occasion I’ve encountered one of my idols. It happened in 1981 seeing Elizabeth Taylor leave the theatre after a performance of The Little Foxes on Broadway, it happened meeting Mary Tyler Moore on the street (and getting an autograph) in between the…
By John H. Foote Mummies, vampires, witches, werewolves, ghosts, and zombies truly can be frightening. Yet for me the single most terrifying creature I have experienced in a film was a human being, Dr. Hannibal Lector. Scariest moment? A rubber ball comes bouncing down a flight of stairs, still wet from having been tossed into…
By Alan Hurst Witches have always intrigued me. Whether it was watching the TV series Bewitched as a kid, touring the sites of Salem, Massachusetts (home of the infamous Salem witch trials) on a road trip, reading Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in school, or a first viewing of Rosemary’s Baby (1968), the mere idea of…