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Bombast #63
If you want to develop a schizophrenic attitude about the value of a dollar, I suggest dividing your adolescent listening time between finger-wagging punk/hardcore music, and licentious, make-it-rain...
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Bombast #64
Last Saturday, October 20th, I fulfilled a dream that began when I was a wee 12-year-old watching reruns of NBC-TV’s CPO Sharkey on the infant Comedy Central: I finally saw national treasure Donald...
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Bombast #65
This week, the world of film criticism was rocked by some unexpected news. I am referring, of course, to Gene Shalit’s encounter with a utility pole in Lenox, Massachusetts. I wish the best of luck to...
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Bombast #66
When I was around 5 or 6 years old, I received what I recall to have been my first albums: “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Dare to be Stupid and “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D, both on cassette tape, both as...
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Bombast #67
It was a minute or so into the opening credits of Robert Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming that I wondered: “Is there going to be a single woman in this movie?” There are, but just barely. A few...
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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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