What do you get when you combine a script co-written by James Cameron with the direction of Robert Rodriguez? We’ll find out when Alita: Battle Angel is released into theaters on December 21st!
A24’s latest period piece, Mid90s, will be released into theaters on October 19th. This film is the directorial debut of Jonah Hill and, judging from the trailer, his film has got the 90s down.
SNL comedienne Gilda Radner gets a much deserved tribute in Love, Gilda. This documentary will be in theaters on September 21st.
Judging from the trailer, Final Score looks like it might be the best action film of 1992. It’s Die Hard in a stadium. The Eurotrash villains take 35,000 football hooligans hostage but everyone’s too much into the match to notice. At first, I thought this trailer had to be a parody.
Speaking of things that seem like parodies but are actually meant to be taken seriously, Hunter Killer is a real movie starring two real Oscar winners. Keep an eye out for Gary Oldman and Common in theaters on October 26th.
Finally, proving that not even bad reviews can keep a Marvel hero down, Netflix’s Iron Fist returns for a second season on September 7th.
Underneath the sleek, art deco cover to Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #5, we find a story that’s actually pretty heavy on intrigue — both of the political and sexual variety. On the sexual front, our guy Wilhelm’s insatiable appetites are finally straining his largely-sham marriage to the breaking point, even as his philosophy of, for wont of a better term, scientific libertine-ism begins to bear fruit in terms of small-scale social changes in Germany. His “success” is not without its detractors, though, one of them being his then-beloved Communist party, who sever ties with him in the face of the right-wing repression sweeping the country. Which brings us, I suppose, to the political intrigue, as this installment sees both Hitler’s rise to power and, subsequently, the totalitarian measures enacted in the wake of the Reichstag fire, necessitate Reich’s flight from…
David Lee Roth first came to prominence as the lead singer of Van Halen. Famously, he and Eddie Van Halen did not get along but the band’s early success was definitely due to the combination of Eddie’s technical virtuosity and Roth’s unabashed stage presence. For better or worse, Roth earned the right to be known as Diamond Dave. When Roth left Van Halen (for the first time) and embarked on his solo career, he made up for what he may have lacked in range with pure theatrical showmanship. Nowhere was that more evident than in Roth’s first solo hit, a cover of the Beach Boys’s California Girls.
Even before the video begins, we know what’s in store for us:
Assuming the opening quote hasn’t scared you off, the video proper begins somewhere in California, with a campy Twilight Zone-style narrator introducing us to a tour group of strange-looking tourists and Jane Leeves. (Nine years after this video, Leeves would be better known for playing Daphne Moon on Frasier.)
Fortunately, the world’s best tour guide is there to show them what California’s all about!
But first, Diamond Dave makes them all walk through a cemetery for some reason.
Of course, Diamond Dave loves the East Coast Girls. The Yo Mamma graffiti is a nice touch.
And Diamond Dave loves the Southern Girls, with the way they talk and hang their Confederate flags.
He also likes the Midwest Girls and, apparently, corn.
And don’t forget Northern Girls, with the way they kiss in the snow.
But you know what Dave really likes?
California Girls!
Jane Leeves is amazed!
The bodybuilder here is played by Kay Baxter, who was Dave’s personal trainer at the time.
The screenshot below is not only the epitome of Diamond Dave but also a good example of why he and Van Halen have always had such an uneasy working relationship. Eddie Van Halen could probably perform a technically perfect version of California Girls (or any other Beach Boys song) but he could never pull off an orange suit and a bowtie.
The video’s most famous (and most often parodied) moment comes when Dave dances down a runway of bikini-clad models, who are all standing still and posed like mannequins. It may be ridiculous put it’s also the epitome of David Lee Roth.
California Girls was one of Roth’s biggest solo hits and, much like him, it epitomizes an era. Roth would later rejoin and leave Van Halen several more times before finally joining again in 2007. When last checked, Roth was still a member and he probably still loves California girls.
Joan Crawford and Bette Davis had been Hollywood stars forever by the time they filmed WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?. Davis was now 54 years old, Crawford 58, and both stars were definitely on the wane when they teamed for this bizarre Robert Aldrich movie, the first (and arguably best) of what has become know as the “Grand Dame Guignol” (or “psycho-biddy”) genre.
Bette is Baby Jane Hudson, a washed-up former vaudeville child star with a fondness for booze, while Joan plays her sister Blanche, a movie star of the 30’s permanently paralyzed in a car accident allegedly caused by Jane. The two live together in a run-down old house, both virtual prisoners trapped in time and their own minds. Blanche wants to sell the old homestead and send Jane away for treatment, but Jane, jealous of her sister’s new-found popularity via her televised old films, descends further into alcoholism…
Released in December of 2016, Live By Night was one of those highly anticipated films that ended up bombing at the box office and leaving critics cold. The anticipation was due to the fact that Live By Night was the first film that Ben Affleck had directed since Argo won best picture. It was seen as Affleck’s next prestige picture, the one that would remind everyone that he was more than just the latest actor to be cast as Batman. Live By Night was expected to be a huge Oscar contender. As for why it bombed at the box office, that may have had something to do with the fact that Live By Night is not a very good film.
It’s a gangster film, one that takes place during prohibition. Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck) is the most boring gangster in Boston. Or, at least, he is until he falls for the wrong woman and he ends up having to flee down to Tampa. Once down there, Joe sets himself up as the most boring gangster in Florida. There’s all sorts of themes running through Live By Night — racial themes, economic themes, even some heavy-handed religious themes — but ultimately, the main impression that one gets from the film’s story is that Joe Coughlin was a very boring gangster.
Anyway, Joe gets involved in all sorts of corruption and violence. He brings down his friend, Dion (Chris Messina), to help him out. Whereas Joe is rational and dull, Dion is violent and dull. You spend the entire movie waiting for the moment when Dion will turn on Joe but it never happens. I guess that’s a good thing since Joe and Dion are busy battling the Klan. Joe may be a 1920s gangster but he’s got the political and cultural outlook of a 21st century movie star.
Joe knows that prohibition is going to end someday, so he hopes to make money through opening up a casino. Standing in the way of the casino is a prostitute-turned-evangelist named Loretta (Elle Fanning). Loretta is the daughter of the local police chief (Chris Cooper), with whom Joe has an uneasy friendship. You keep expecting this plot to go somewhere but it really doesn’t. Loretta’s just kinda there. That said, we do get a hilarious shot of a tearful Chris Cooper repeating the word repent over and over again so there is that.
Zoe Saldana is also just kind of there, playing Joe’s Cuban wife. Again, you expect a lot to happen with Saldana’s character but, for the most part, she’s mostly just a plot device who exists solely so that Joe can have some sort of motivation beyond simply wanting to get rich.
It’s a big, sprawling film that never quite feels like an epic. A huge part of the problem is that Ben Affleck the director is let down by Ben Affleck the actor. Regardless of what’s happening in the scene, Affleck always has the same grim look on his face. At times, it seems as if he’s literally been chiseled out of a marble and you find yourself wondering if he’s actually capable of any facial expression beyond glum annoyance. A gangster film like this need a bigger-than-life protagonist but, as played by Affleck, Joe always seems to be in danger of vanishing into the scenery.
I think part of the problem is that Affleck’s previous films all dealt with places and subjects that Affleck felt comfortable with, perhaps because he could relate their stories to his own personal experiences. Gone, Baby, Gone and The Townboth took place exclusively in Boston. Argo dealt with the film industry. Live By Night is a period piece set in the South and Affleck is obviously lost from the minute Joe arrives in Florida.
Live By Night, I think, could have been a good movie if it had been directed by someone like Paul Thomas Anderson and maybe if an actor like Colin Farrell played the role of Joe. But, as it is, it’s just a rather stolid and uninspiring gangster film.
One of the first great hits of the new wave era, Gary Numan’s Cars was inspired by an incident of road rage. As Numan explained in an interview
“I was in traffic in London once and had a problem with some people in front. They tried to beat me up and get me out of the car. I locked the doors and eventually drove up on the pavement and got away from them. It’s kind of to do with that. It explains how you can feel safe inside a car in the modern world… When you’re in it, your whole mentality is different… It’s like your own little personal empire with four wheels on.”
From this humble beginning came the song that not only became synonymous with post-punk new wave music but which also inspired an untold number of teenagers to switch from learning how to play the drums to wanting a keyboard for Christmas. Cars may have been about something as modern as road rage but its futuristic sound and video made it a science fiction anthem.
(Sorry, you’re probably going to have to go to YouTube to actually watch this video.)
Cars starts with what I like to call a Doctor Who shot.
Anyone who has ever seen classic Doctor Who or really any science fiction movie from the late 70s knows how important neon was to decorating any villain’s intergalactic lair. When Gary Numan approaches the microphone, he could easily be mistaken for a militaristic alien who had made the mistake of falling under the influence of the Master.
Once Numan starts to perform, it becomes more obvious that he was more inspired by David Bowie than Doctor Who:
The video features several close-ups of Numan’s tambourine. The effect may seem cheesy now but in 1979, it undoubtedly blew a lot of minds.
Of course, no new wave video would be complete without some synthesizer action.
Cars became an unexpected hit and remains popular today. Anyone who has played Grand Theft Auto: Vice City knows the pleasure of fleeing the police while listening to Cars on Wave 103.
After finding myself considerably more than pleased with writer/director Scott Frank’s 2014 adaptation of modern noir master Lawrence Block’s gritty PI drama A Walk Among The Tombstones, I decided, in spite (or maybe because?) of its 0% Rotten Tomatoes score, to track down the only other cinematic take on Block’s work (and, more specifically, on his legendary protagonist, former-cop-turned-unlicensed-gumshoe Matt Scudder), 1986’s 8 Million Ways To Die. As things turned out, I had to go the Blu-ray route with this one since it’s not available for streaming anywhere so far as I can tell, but hey, things could have been worse — the Kino Lorber Blu (and,I presume, DVD, although I didn’t actually check to see if it’s available in that format) is actually a semi-recent release, dating back to October of 2017, and if I’d been determined to track this flick down before that, I may have…
2018 is the centennial anniversary of Mickey Spillane’s birth! Spillane got his start in comic books, then caused a sensation with his 1947 novel I, THE JURY, introducing the world to that hardest of hardboiled PI’s, Mike Hammer. Hard Case Crime, an imprint every pulp fiction fan should know about, celebrates Spillane’s birth by releasing THE LAST STAND, The Mick’s last completed novel, with a bonus unpublished novella from the early 1950’s.
Spillane with friend/literary executor Max Allan Collins
Mickey’s literary executor and friend Max Allan Collins writes the introduction. Collins is no stranger to the hardboiled genre himself, having been Chester Gould’s replacement on the long-running comic strip Dick Tracy from 1977-92, author of the graphic novel ROAD TO PERDITION, and the Quarry series of books (made into a Showtime series in 2016). Since Spillane’s death in 2006, Collins has been editing and completing the writer’s (“I’m not an…
Through the Shattered Lens 