If ever I'm in a coma and you can't reach me, play some of Bill Conti's score for the Rocky series (Conquest might work best). That about illustrates how deeply Rocky resonates with me, and a lot of other people.
Poverty. Illness. Discrimination. Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
Rocky speaks past those battles to the deepest part of each of us, the part which may sometimes be beaten but refuses to be defeated. And…
(Top 250 reviewed)
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While it was a moderate success at the box office ($24 million domestically on a budget of $10 mil), it was the soundtrack for 1995's Dead Presidents that was a major hit, getting certified gold about three months after its initial release.
The soundtrack is one of the best of its kind, an amazing mix of some of the greatest, funkiest grooves ever committed to vinyl by the likes of James Brown, Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield,…
There's a scene at the beginning of The Longest Yard where Burt Reynolds' character of a disgraced pro football player is in a bar getting sloppy(er) drunk after leading the cops on an insane high speed chase in a car he just stole from his wealthy socialite girlfriend because he's tired of being her puppet boy-toy. The cops come in to drag his ass to jail, and yet neither them or the bartender can contain their amusement with the no-fucks-given…
Superman killed the 70's disaster movie.
Really.
Ostensibly kicked off in 1970 by the success of Airport, movie-going audiences spent a decade getting pummeled by spectacle-laden big budget stories of everyday people getting the bejesus blasted out of them by every type of catastrophe imaginable, and paid gladly for the experience. But then came Christmas 1978, and with it the arrival of Superman: The Movie in theaters, which quickly broke numerous box office records. The following year saw the release…
American distributors had little faith in how this 1971 Bruce Lee vehicle from Hong Kong would fare upon release in the U.S., revising the dubbing and music until finally releasing it in 1973 as Fists of Fury. It's a bizarre and messily assembled beast, but those distributors might've been onto something because this cut of Big Boss also happens to be the Kung Fu film that made me fall in love with Kung Fu films...and with the big brass score…
(This is a review of William Friedkin's extended director's cut of The Exorcist, which is about 20 mins longer than the original theatrical cut)
There's a key moment early on in The Exorcist where Father Merrin (Max Von Sydow) is taking part in an archeological dig in northern Iraq, and one of the diggers alerts him that they have uncovered a small chamber. The elderly priest goes to the location of the discovery, gets down on his hands and knees,…
The Weekly Animation Challenge 2018
Week 21: Director Spotlight: Ralph Bakshi
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Time has not softened the provocative nature of Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin, nor has the director distanced himself in recent years from a film that more squeamish directors would handle like a landmine of controversy buried deep within their filmography, just waiting to do damage. No, Bakshi even considers the 1975 satire his best work. While I'm not as enthusiastic in my assessment (and I think Fritz the Cat…
This movie looks like it was a tremendous pain in the ass to make. Forget the fact that it's shot on multiple continents in several major cities, and includes a massive number of locals cast as extras who have to give very specific, powerful, emotional performances at times (all of them!) The centerpiece of this film is a sequence involving two (TWO!) large transport trucks having to travel across decaying South American rope bridges in the middle of a hellacious…
The 2019 Cult Movie Challenge
Week 6: Video Nasties Week
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Take some brooding Fabio Frizzi synth score built on a persistent & unnatural pulse like it's coming from somewhere dark deep down in the ground, lay it over hazy cemetery cinematography with editing that lets it linger on the wonderfully gruesome practical effects rot of an undead corpse rising up out the grave and lo and behold you've got a cinematic speedball of the sedating and the unnerving that had…
Whether you're a diehard fan or this is your first introduction to the bizarre, hilarious, and deeply silly world of British comedy group Monty Python, 1971's And Now for Something Completely Different is a marvelous encapsulation of their brand of humor. It's a greatest hits of their work from the TV series up to that point, and a near-perfect Python primer for the uninitiated.
The film takes many of the best sketches from the first two seasons of the show--cheeky…
The Anime Marches On! 2019 Challenge (18/26)
Five Anime Films from the Nineties (4/5)
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Memories is an appropriately-named sci-fi/fantasy/horror anthology from three different directors whose three different segments each call back to various giants of the genres: the first, where a deep space salvage crew encounters a hypnotic presence that can read their thoughts, feels like it's blending shades of Alien and Star Trek and 2001 until it becomes its own unique flavor where anything can happen; segment two,…