To watch the film “The Iron Lady” is like trying to learn about a person from a list.
Grocer’s daughter, check. Politician, check. Anti Thatcher demonstrations, check. Falklands war, check. Going to celebrate the fall of the Iron curtain, check.
For anyone not aware of the history of the 1970’s and 1980’s, the quick scenes depicting some […]

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Stuntmen and Daredevils share one common trait, at some point in their career, regardless of how well prepared and planned a stunt goes south, and goes south in a life threatening way. That reality hit Jack Young in 1959 while making the classic western The Alamo.
Even if you are not a western fan The Alamo […]

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Several weeks ago I was sent an early galley for Sam Moffie’s soon to be released book To Kill The Duke. At first I was convinced that Sam had completely lost his mind! The plot that Sam uses is that Josef Stalin sent assassins to the US to wipe out John Wayne. And as a […]

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The film business is not an easy one. Mostly what the audience sees has been preordained by the big studios, big budgets, big name stars, and big clout with the distributors and movie theater chains. There is little room for the indie film maestro. However once in a great while an Indie film maker does […]

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An Oscar nomination is every film makers dream. Alas the number of dreams that are realized is very few. This is particularly true for independent movies. The problem lays not in the quality of the films, but in the almost insurmountable problem of finding screening opportunities for eyeballs to watch it.
This is doubly true when […]

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Earlier this week I published an article about  soon to be released book To Kill The Duke by author Sam Moffie. I went to great pains in the article to not discuss the plot nor the background of the story.
So I was somewhat surprised when a reader left a comment that revealed some insider info. […]

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World War I is getting some attention in the entertainment industry lately, with the high class hit “Downton Abbey” and now the Stephen Spielburg film “War Horse”.
The plot is simple: think of Lassie comes home (the 1943 version) of a beloved animal separated from his master and trying to survive. Except in this one it […]

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There are few people that would disagree with legislation that limits their ability to use the internet. Maybe the best known rendition of this is The Great Firewall Of China. Needless to say access to this site from China was curtailed several years ago.
It also would appear that Myanmar (Burma for us old folks), and […]

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An Interview With AMD’s Charlie Boswell

Every family has Christmas Traditions, how they start is often unclear, but whatever it is does become part of the festive season. For some inexplicable reason I have one. How it started is long long lost in the annals of time. But every Christmas Season I seem to do an […]

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I spend a fair amount of time talking to people connected with the movie world. They tend to be larger than life, and always entertaining. There seems to be little rhyme or reason as to how a movie comes into being, or what subject it might be about.
Next March the poor unsuspecting world is […]

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The president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers Reggie Littlejohn, who is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Committee for U.S. International Broadcasting (CUSIB), said that Christian Bale is a hero for trying to visit Chinese human rights advocate Chen Guangcheng who is kept under house arrest in China.
Women’s Rights Without Frontiers is […]

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I read a name from the past in today’s news: Medgar Evers.
The name takes me back to the days of when as a child we visited our aunt who lived in the deep south, and I was astonished that there “colored only” restaurants and water fountains.
Evers was one of the heroes who fought for the […]

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It takes a lot to shock Hollywood. But the news that Newt Gingrich has bumped Jon Corzine as supervillain Two-Face in the next Batman is making jaws drop in Dream City. Corzine was reportedly in like Flynn; his duplicitous doings at MF Global made him Two-Face to the max. Sure, Jon had heavy competition from […]

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This just in from Hollywood– Jon Corzine, who until about a week ago was Top Dog in the tanking Wall Street unreality series My Own Private MF Global has been cast as supervillain Two-Face in the next Batman opus. Buzz sez Bat producer Michael Uslan saw the Reuters piece The Two Faces of Jon Corzine […]

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Money Ball is deservingly going to draw comparisons to The Social Network primarily because both are true stories about people who found success doing the seemingly impossible by going about their business in an unlikely and unusual way.  The other comparison will come from the fact that both had academy award level performances.

Money Ball is […]

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The latest “Western” movie from Hollywood, about aliens and starring a petulant British actor, was a bomb, and that led many “experts” to again predict the demise of the Western as a film genre. Of course, the real reason for the problem is the nihilism of Hollywood, not the lack of stories.
So could I suggest […]

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My husband as a young teenager joined his older brother’s guerilla group to help rid Luzon of the Japanese in 1945. Alas, the story of the terrible fight, first in the city of Manila, and later against the fleeing Japanese hiding in the jungles and mountains of Luzon, is too often forgotten, overshadowed by those […]

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In case you are only aware of the “hits”, the movie Soul Surfer is a “sleeper”: a small movie that becomes widely seen by word of mouth recommendations.
I usually dislike surfer movies (e.g. Blue Crush) but I do like the photography of the ocean in them, so I watched this one.
The good news: some good […]

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If you aren’t already frightened for the direction in which this country is headed, then the first few minutes of “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1” will scare your pants off!  In order to Expedite the exposition process Atlas Shrugged starts out with a media montage of life in the year 2016.  America’s infrastructure is crumbling, and America’s industry […]

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The thing about this movie is that I never felt bored.  That’s important because unlike some movies that are very focused on a single character, causing to that character to be central to every scene, I never felt tired of our hero in Limitless.
 
The lead actor in question here is Bradley Cooper who plays Eddie […]

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I expected to be bored by the movie “The King’s  Speech”, but I quickly became absorbed in this quiet drama of a man struggling to overcome his fear.
I was going to write “fear of speaking in public”, but that trivializes the dread that most people feel when talking or performing in public. But in the […]

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I class myself as blessed. I know the strangest people, and they in turn introduce me to others. Oh, do not get me wrong, I love all of these people. I feel privileged to call them friends. But, to the average person some of them may seem just a little eccentric.
Several weeks ago I was […]

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Acorn Media are a DVD production and marketing company who specialize in bringing the very best British TV series to American audiences. A couple of years ago they added a new label Athena, this branch specializes in incredibly high quality documentary programming. With over 20 years of experience the Acorn catalog is second to none. […]

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Tangled is the modern retelling of the Rapunzel story, but it is in the same mode as the older fairy tale cartoons, not a snarky retelling of a fairytale as in the Shreck series, or a sad morality tale like the Toy story series. Being made by the Disney folks, it follows the “Disney princess” […]

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The third in the “Narnia” series in now at a theater near you.
The good news: It’s better than Prince Caspian.
The bad news: It’s a bit hard to follow.
The Good news: Eustace.
There I was, sitting annoyed and bored as the gushy Pevensie kids were saying how happy they were to be back at Narnia…. but there […]

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My wife is convinced that I have the strangest friends on the planet. She may well be correct. They are all unique in their own way. Some write, some sing, some are happiest in front of the camera, and some behind the camera. Some are famous, some are infamous, and some are people that […]

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For a mere ten million dollars the fine people at Rogue Pictures have put together a slick looking movie in Skyline. However outside of the scary looking aliens, blue LED light effects and space ships, there isn’t much going for this movie.Staring Donald Fasion (and I use the term ‘staring’ loosely as Fasion is merely […]

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Will Ferrell is famous as one of Hollywood’s top comedic leading men known primarily for his overacting and generally crazy onscreen antics.   However, Ferrell has a complementary talent: (other than his sexy crooning vocals featured in “Semi-Pro”) voice acting.
Ferrell voices the title character “Megamind” an evil blue alien who crash-lands on earth after his home […]

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 Maybe, like a lot of people who dismissed Joe Camp’s idea of making a movie starring a dog, you are a reader who says, “who wants to read about making a movie that starred a dog?” But this book is so much more than a story about a dog or about making a […]

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My wife claims that I know the strangest people. I disagree, I just seem to meet interesting people and for some reason we seem to get along. A great example is Charlie Boswell. I have known The Bos for about three years, every time I chat with him I learn something new. Today was no […]

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