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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 #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 #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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