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Bombast #32
I’ve been meaning to do something with this for a couple of weeks. It’s a video from something called the Knockout Network featuring a young woman named “Vivian Kellie.” She is identified as a “sexy...
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Bombast #36
Criticism of all stripes, the personal essay, the feuilleton, and the knock-knock joke are all dead as Dillinger: this is a given. But for those of us whose sole desire is to be “in the arts” without...
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Bombast #45
To my great regret, last weekend I missed a showing of Ishirō Honda’s Mothra at the Journal Square Loew’s in Jersey City, New Jersey. In part, my disappointment stems from the fact that the movie is a...
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Bombast #46
Andrew Sarris died this week. My father got the news before I did, which means it was news. When I checked my e-mail upon emerging from a screening of a just-irredeemably-awful movie on Wednesday,...
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Bombast #47
I would like to begin this week with a moment of silence for Emi Ito of The Peanuts, whose performances in the Mothra films I spoke of fondly only two columns ago. It was in revisiting Ms. Ito’s...
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Bombast #48
This week Time Out New York released its list of the 100 Best movies shot in New York. All the Internet loves a list, and as such things go it’s well done, but while cycling through it I couldn’t help...
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Bombast #49
Reading my François Mauriac by guttering candlelight, I re-encountered the following, from the 1962 essay collection Cain, Where is Your Brother?: “A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place...
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Bombast #50
This week has been dominated by the long-spreading shadow preceding the anticipated touch-down of Christopher Nolan’s latest Batman opus. Has there been such a brouhaha over the theater since the O.P....
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Bombast #51
It’s now just over a week since James Eagan Holmes opened fire at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, and time enough has passed to collate the reactions. For starters,...
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Bombast #52
NEWS ON THE MARCH! This week the venerable UK film mag Sight & Sound released its seventh “Greatest Films of All Time” survey, the results of which have been unveiled every decade since 1952. The...
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Bombast #53
“I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror” said Carson McCullers of Columbus, Georgia—but I am afraid that I actually rather enjoy returning to Cincinnati, Ohio. I am particularly fond...
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Bombast #54
Prompted by the death of Gore Vidal, which was subject of this column two weeks prior, I finally picked up a copy of Screening History last week, the author’s sole work built around—I cannot say...
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Bombast #55
The Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles’s traditionally blue-collar South Bay connects San Pedro on the West side to Terminal Island and Long Beach on the East. The area is well-represented in motion...
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Bombast #56
It so happened that I had re-watched Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, as I am wont to do about once a year, the night before the news of the Republican National Convention’s surprise guest speaker leaked....
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Bombast #57
Once upon re-watching The Thin Man (1934), I made a point of counting the martinis that William Powell’s Nick Charles slung back during a single party scene. I can’t remember the exact total, but it...
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Bombast #58
The good guys do not always win, but as often as not I am right about whom the good guys are—except when I’m dead wrong. Over the past week, reconfirmation of this fact came with the revelation that...
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Bombast #59
“Yesterday had been summer in the city, the end of summer stale and jaded, with a dejection in the air that dragged like an old skirt in the gutter.” So begins one of my favorite works of fantasy...
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Bombast #60
Just now I watched the reconvened NFL referees give every last chance of victory to the “Cleveland Browns” expansion team, which nevertheless earnestly lost its fourth straight game of the still-young...
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Bombast #61
I have been working on a list of things whose presence alone can render a movie at least watchable. One of them is a character dashing a salt shaker into a mug of beer. Other examples include: *Maps...
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Bombast #62
Can you smell the cannonades? A long-fomenting revolution is underway! Movies are going to be fun again! Was the Lexington moment when Dan Kois pushed away a steaming plateful of cultural...
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