By John H. Foote (****) Streaming on Apple The scam is perfect, unless like any scam you attempt to grift the wrong person. Dr. Amos (Alicia Witt) keeps her eye open for the perfect victim, the cherry as she calls it. This is an elderly person, with family or without, doing well, not yet infirmed,…
By John H. Foote 29. BUGSY (1991) Watching Bugsy again the other night it was impossible not to feel a pang that Warren Beatty’s volcanic, freight train performance of the celebrated mobster Bugsy Seigel failed to win the gifted actor, director, writer an Academy Award for Best Actor. Though Beatty is an Academy Award winning…
By John H. Foote Confession: Alan’s recent article on Marsha Mason sent me back watching a handful of Richard Dreyfuss films from the seventies, so I thought I might flash back to him. Credit to Alan for inspiring this one. After a few years toiling between small roles in film and television, Dreyfuss was cast…
By John H. Foote By the end of the nineties audiences would know precisely what the following things and people were: CGI, Jurassic Park, the American western, Apollo 13, Dances with Wolves, Woody and Buzz, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Carrey, Paul Thomas Anderson, M. Night Shymalan, Truman Burbank, Tyler Durden, John Travolta, Hannibal Lector and Clarice…
By John H. Foote The nineties cinema, closely, for me resembled that of the seventies. Audacious, bold, inventive, with an array of established filmmakers doing the finest work of their careers and emerging artists challenging them for greatness. Long ignored for an Academy Award as Best Director, Steven Spielberg would win twice in the nineties,…
By John H. Foote With Steven Spielberg’s remake of the Academy Award winning musical West Side Story, several other major remakes have been put into pre-production. Bear in mind the long-awaited remake of Dune, directed by the gifted Denis Villeneuve, delayed in 2020 arrives this fall. Cannot wait for both. The King and I, which won…
By Alan Hurst For about 10 years Marsha Mason had a pretty decent run in films. She was in some major box-office hits, she received positive reviews and Oscar nominations for her work in both comedy and drama, and she usually projected a likeable and relatable screen presence. But by the mid eighties she had…
By John H. Foote Bruce Dern was worried about looking like a nut job. Dern was a great actor who took his role as the damaged Marine Bob Hyde in Coming Home (1978) very seriously and was concerned he was going to be portrayed in the film as a madman. He was, after all, the…
By John H. Foote And finally, the greatest film of the nineties … 1. E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982) Yes, I agonized over the choice for number one, and again the three listed as best of the decade could be interchangeable depending on the day and my mood. Why not Raging Bull (1980)? While I admire…
By John H. Foote 2. RAGING BULL (1980) As I stated in the previous piece, I agonized over my top three choices and the order I would place them in. It is generally regarded that Martin Scorsese’s exhaustive, fearsome masterpiece Raging Bull is the greatest film of the eighties, and while I might agree on…