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Bombast #68
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the peculiar phenomenon of growing up parodic—that is, of having experienced the world, almost from the cradle, through the distorted lens of farce. And, lo and...
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Bombast #69
Last week, in my musings about the thin line between engaging with and becoming caught up in the self-perpetuating, self-justifying hamster wheel of pop culture, I mentioned Rihanna’s gimmick 777...
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Bombast #70
You could do worse for career advice than consulting Wizard, though Peter Boyle’s monologue does leave a few dangling questions. Some time ago I saw a documentary called Je t’aime… moi non plus:...
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Bombast #71
At the Buechenwald camp gate stood a niche for the watchdog. A chained beast barked at passers-by, and greedily buried its snout in its bowl of mush. Even though the beast never stood up on its hind...
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Bombast #72
Tom Hooper does just about everything that a director can do to render his screen adaptation of Les Misérables unwatchable—which is only to be expected. I had known that there was something very wrong...
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Bombast #74
You find yourself doing a lot of things over the holidays and break—if you are lucky enough to have a holiday break—that you might otherwise not. One example is socially drinking for thirty...
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Bombast #76
Every month or so for the past year and some change, Cristina Cacioppo, programmer at 92YTribeca has been good enough to locate and screen a 35mm film print of a title determined by myself and my...
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Bombast #77
The Tri-Star Pictures Pegasus, galloping towards my living room, is for me today the very image of childhood—such is the persistence of production logos in the mind. (Speaking of, I am certain I don’t...
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Bombast #78
Every so often I will run into an old acquaintance, or get a random text message, and have to field the question “Are you still in New York?” There is often a hint of incredulity to this, while that...
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Bombast #79
“Twitter, blogs, enriched media… They’re all fads.” Boris McGiver as Tom Hammerschmidt, editor-in-chief of the Washington Herald, House of Cards Some time ago I wrote in this column that “’What...
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Bombast #80
Joseph Aloysius Dwan was born in Toronto in 1885, when the future megalopolis’s population was only around 100,000. He died in December of 1981, aged 96, in California. In between, Dwan had taken up...
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Bombast #81
Slow news week in film culture®. A middling second-string critic parted ways in a snit with The Village Voice, which really hasn’t been readable since Mailer left, prompting a languorous yawn of...
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Bombast #82
For obvious reasons, Garrison Keillor has always irked me—the “Stupid TV! Be more funny!” gag on The Simpsons covers it—but never more than when he sweepingly opines on the nature of being Midwestern....
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Bombast #83
“Yesterday, that might have meant something… Now it means nothing, nothing at all.” That’s Gloria Grahame at the end of 1950’s In a Lonely Place. Grahame plays a young woman named Laurel Gray, who...
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Bombast #86
The Sweet Science is joined onto the past like a man’s arm to his shoulder. - A.J. Liebling Last week I watched exactly one moving picture—an Omnimax production about the migratory patterns of Monarch...
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Bombast #87
A couple of months ago, I wrote about my first encounter with the print edition of a flimsy ‘zine called Reverse Shot, just suitably sized for fanning one’s self, which I discovered in the lobby...
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Bombast #88
During “Jerry Lewis: Live in Concert,” which I attended at Long Island’s Westbury Music Fair last Saturday, the 87-year-old performer spoke on dozens of occasions of his allegiance to his audience, of...
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Bombast #92
Ray Harryhausen died on Tuesday. The sense of loss was acute, as for many of us, Harryhausen had been a living link—an artery, even—to irreplaceable childhood memories. Even among people who’ve never...
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Bombast #94
I have a recurring dream—not an uncommon one, I’ve gathered—in which I’m forced to go back to high school. A clerical error is discovered, some minor oversight, and it turns out I was a few credit...
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Bombast #95
The Internet has many uses, and foremost among these is providing multiple forums for people to register their flummoxed, spluttering indigence about one thing or another. Most of the outrage seems to...
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Bombast #96
What is Vulgar Auteurism? If a May 24 primer in the Voice Media Group’s New York City paper is any indication, it’s a shameless attention grab. A critical tool of any use? Not so much. Yet all the...
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Bombast #98
When in Saugerties, Ulster County, New York state, be sure to visit the Orpheum Theatre. Reading comments in the invaluable cinematreasures.org website, I have learned that the Orpheum has perhaps a...
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Bombast #99
The first time I watched The Secret of NIMH, if my memory serves, was in the break room at La Petite France, in the northern suburbs of Cincinnati, where I’d been stowed while waiting for my mother’s...
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Bombast #100
Technically this is my 101st weekly column in this space, given that the last couple of weeks were devoted to a two-parter covering two of my very favorite subjects, boundless sorrow and...
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Bombast #101
I’ve been working YouTube music links into this column for as long as I’ve been writing it—at first wherever they fit, later as a send-off. Usually the chosen song has some vague thematic connection...
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Bombast #102
I first visited Montréal on July, 13, 2001, when I was twenty, on a meandering road trip with my then-girlfriend. It’s easy to date: Sigur Rós’ album Ágætis byrjun had then recently been released in...
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Bombast #103
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “PUNK: Chaos to Couture,” a fashion exhibit organized by the museum’s Costume Institute, will close in a couple of weeks. Though it will retire as a success,...
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Bombast #104
25 SITUATIONS ONLY FILM PPL CAN UNDERSTAND I BET YOU RECOGNIZE AT LEAST 1 OF THESE!!! IF U LIKE PLEASE FWD. : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : ) : )...
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Bombast #105
I don’t know what it is exactly that movies do. I’m still working on it. There are, though, at least two things that they do particularly well: adding an additional element of choreographed...
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Bombast #106
Californians always think of sex Or think of death - The Fall, “C’n'C-S Mithering,” from 1980’s Grotesque (After the Gramme). If that’s true—and The Fall’s Mark E. Smith did marry a Los Angelino, Brix...
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Bombast #109
“If it were just a question of mutilating bodies the way that hack-and-slash movies often do, I wouldn’t find extreme imagery interesting. People often say to me, ‘Why don’t you do it the way...
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Bombast #110
I’ve failed to go to the Toronto International Film Festival so many times in my life as a critic that I might as well pretend that I’m boycotting it, rather than being merely too lazy and distracted...
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Bombast #111
If you read about movies enough, you will repeatedly encounter certain stock phrases meant to explain, in shorthand, the historical and sociological forces at play in pop cultural movements. “Nuclear...
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Bombast #112
The cult of family, I suspect, is responsible for a great deal of the wickedness in this world. So many things that are done for family—that noblest and most totalizing of causes—must necessarily be...
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Bombast #113
Can there be such a thing as too much virtuosity? Certainly every time that Floyd Mayweather, Jr., among the greatest defensive boxers in the history of the sport, delivers another of his slippery...
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Bombast #115
When Lou Reed died this week, the obituary consensus was that we’d lost the embodiment of “New York cool”—though if that really was all that there was to the man and his art, I would’ve said “Good...
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Bombast #116
While the etymology of the word “blockbuster” is unclear, most of the best guesses have it originating sometime during World War II. It was coined in reference to heavy-duty incendiary bombs—4,000 lbs...
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Bombast #117
Alexander Payne and Wes Anderson both make comedies, albeit comedies laced with strychnine and a dab of treacle. They are less than a decade apart in age—Payne was born in 1961, Anderson in ’69—and...
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Bombast #119
Making art is an expensive habit. If your family was rich to begin with, you’ll drain their resources in pursuit of that habit, with long odds of paying dividends in the end. If nothing else, your...
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Bombast #120
Like everyone else, I’ve been sworn to silence on the subject of The Wolf of Wall Street, but I don’t suppose anyone at Paramount Pictures will mind my saying that it’s one of the best American...
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Bombast #121
There are certain characters and stories that, fundamental to our culture though they may be, don’t necessarily make for ripping yarns on the big screen. “Why do filmmakers think it’s such a good...
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Bombast #122
There’s a lot of talk going around about The Wolf of Wall Street, and a lot of misperceptions to go along with the talk. For example: practically every mention of an early scene in which Leonardo...
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Bombast #123
I started to write a disclaimer/ introduction to my 2013 Best Of…, but on looking at my annual round-up from last year, I realized that I was saying almost exactly the same thing I’d already said. So...
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Bombast #124
The things that wind up hopping the fence between film culture and the world at large can surprise you. Last Tuesday my father sent me a text message asking “What’s your opinion of Armond White?” Up...
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Bombast #125
Last week it was colder in New York City than it was in Park City, Utah. And while many of my colleagues were way out west at Sundance, seizing the opportunity to form and broadcast their opinions...
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Bombast #126
You can keep “cinephile” or the awful “movie buff”—better to call it a life devoted to adventures in perception. Well, the kicks have been thin on the ground lately what with wintertime doldrums and a...
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Bombast #127
Before the lights went down, I saw that right above the space that I’d designated to take notes about The LEGO Movie in my Spiral Fat Book, there was a scribbled passage from my recent reading of Sam...
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Bombast #128
Back in the 19th century when I was writing for a print weekly, I frequently found myself on the No Press Screening movie beat. What that meant was that I’d cover the movies that weren’t shown to...
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Bombast #130
Europeans are of course those ridiculous people who are incapable of getting into a physical altercation without throwing headbutts, wear Zouave pants around SoHo on summer shopping holidays, sell out...
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Bombast #130
First the important stuff. Stay in one place long enough and the memory of how you used to know it starts to haunt you—particularly if it’s a place where property is as desirous as it is in New York...
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