Notes from a bibliophile

Indie films are fantastic. While mainstream Hollywood is beating the same dead horse it's beaten for the last few decades (e.g. A Star is Born was first made 81 years ago! ), the indie scene is where the creative and innovative films get made. Unfortunately they rarely get seen. I think social media helps get the word out for new films, but if you aren't following the right people, you still may not hear about interesting little gems that are hitting the market. I was lucky enough to follow at least one right person who made me aware of the film Sorry to Bother You . After reading a bit about it, watching the trailer, and seeing the talent involved, I decided it was something I really wanted to see. The story is about Cassius "Cash" Green, played by Get Out 's Lakeith Stanfield, who gets a telemarketing job. His first day there, he learns about the power sellers and how they have their own private elevator. But his initial attempts to sell don't go over w...

It’s been a while since I posted anything on here. Part of the reason is that I haven’t really had anything to write about; the other part is I’m not sure anyone really cares what I think. Now at least, I’ve found something I want to tell people about, no matter how few people see it. I joined Moviepass a few months ago. I won’t shill it here, but I think it’s great. If you want more information let me know & I’ll wax rhapsodic there. The thing I love most about it is that it makes me feel able to see films I wouldn’t normally see. There’s at least four films I’ve seen since joining that I wouldn’t have seen without Moviepass, and every one of them I have enjoyed. Maybe I’ll write more on those later. Three Identical Strangers is a documentary that is hard to believe is true. What would you do if you suddenly found out you had a twin? When 19-year-old Bobby attends his first day of college, he is greeted warmly by every stranger he meets, but they all keep calling him Eddie. Af...

Back in the day, I worked at a little mom-and-pop video store. It was pretty cool. We rented VHS and Beta. They had a pretty awesome backlist of titles, too many to work through. Also a lot of soft porn. The best was working on Saturday mornings. The boss didn’t come in til late in the day, and no one came in the story, or if they did, it was just to drop off and run back out. So you had all morning and an extensive library at your fingertips. I saw Eraserhead on one of those Saturdays, and after I transferred to closing their other branch, I was able to watch pretty much watch the entire run of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Not to mention the screeners we’d get in advance of the tapes hitting the shelves. Those were good times. A friend and I had a pool going every year about which of us could predict the most Oscar wins. I invariably lost every year, because I tend to vote with my heart and not like an Oscar voter (and who knows what they vote with). Granted, I haven’t seen a lot of...

For such a short month, February already looks like a much more promising month than January. I’ve never paid this much attention to it before, so maybe that’s the way it always is. But there’s one thing that I find that’s really annoying me. The point of making and distributing a film/television show is to get viewers. Viewers bring in revenue, which means people can make more films and television shows that viewers will want to watch. Pretty basic stuff. So why, pray tell, am I finding it so hard to access trailers for upcoming titles? It’s not like I’m trying to see a trailer of Infinity War  or anything. These things are a month or so out. If I can’t find something online by now that intrigues me enough to say, I gotta see that, then someone is not doing their job. More on that later. First up, on February 2nd, there’s two Netflix originals that look really promising while appearing to be worlds apart. First is Altered Carbon . I...

It’s like Hollywood suffers from the same post-holiday stupor as the rest of us. They’ve had too much turkey all year and finally have to put on their stretchy pants before falling asleep in the BarcaLounger in front of whatever sports game they happen to be interested in. Hardly anything of interest comes out in January. Here’s what I could scrape together: On January 1st, there’s a French thriller called Glacé which is about a murder in the Alps. On January 12, The Post hits movie theatres. It tells the story of The Washington Post ’s decision to go against White House orders to publish information about the Vietnam War. It may get a lot of airtime,  what with one side bashing it as maybe where journalism begin its foray into “fake news” and the other side peraising it as a shining beacon of journalistic integrity. I’m sure it’ll get lots of nominations too. On Amazon Prime - which now has an app on Apple TV and I apparently have an account ( who knew?!?) - Philip K Dick’s ...

It’s the last month of the year. Finally. We get to the end of the year and we’re just so ready for it to be over, hoping the new year will hold so much more promise. But the end of the year is the time when the Oscar-bait movies come out. Here’s some stuff I’m looking forward to. On December 1st, Netflix debuts the first German language series its carried as an original series. Dark   is a story about a town where two kids go missing. The disappearances hearken back to other missing kids from decades earlier and reveals secrets about the town and its inhabitants. It sounds a little like a German version of IT  but without the creepy clown. It looks like there will be some mind-bending, timey-wimey warping that the characters have to deal with, maybe? Whatever it is, it looks really pretty cool. Also on December 1st, is the decidedly uncool sounding, and yet still intriguing, Voyeur . This is the true story of Gerald Foos, who bought a motel for the ...

Parts of this blog were previously posted on the website I used to write for, but it's been tweaked a little. The men in my family were big into war films. They were also big into westerns, but some thing's just don't take. But war movies can be so much more than just about the battles. Some of the films I've listed here may not be really considered war films, but there is an element of war about them. These are some of my favorite films, in no particular order. Five Came Back I can't stop talking about this documentary series on Netflix. It relates the story of five big name Hollywood directors - Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler - who, like so many actors at the time, volunteered for the army. They immediately began making propaganda films. The films were used to get the American public to back the war in multiple ways - by signing up, by buying war bonds, etc. What began innocuously turned into some of the most amazing, gri...

October had a lot of amazing shows that came out, and I was able to catch quite few of the that I had wanted to watch. November appears to be a much quieter month, but there’s still a few things I hope to be able to see. First off, on November 3rd (or November 2nd if you have advance tickets) is Thor: Ragnarok . I’m obscenely excited for this. The trailer I’ve linked here is the first I’ve seen with Korg. Reviews have been really good, and it’s been called one of the funniest Marvel movies in a while. I think that’s excellent! I’ve been excited since the first strains of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” came blasting out of my speakers months ago. This looks like such a kick-ass film, and I bought my tickets last month for a 7:45 viewing on the 2nd. This is the earliest I’ve ever seen a film. I hate crowds but for Thor (and Loki), I’m going to brave it. Also on November 3rd, over on Netflix, there’s a Margaret Atwood adaptation called Alias Grace . It’s a fictionalization of the tru...

Well, it's been awhile again. I keep telling myself that I'm going to write more on here, but I never seem to follow through. I have been writing though, it's just not something I'm confident enough to share yet (or ever). But now that that little project is done, and it's almost a new month, I'm going to write about the things that I'm really looking forward to next month. This fall seems to be packed with stuff I want to watch, almost more so than the summer. The first thing I'm anticipating is Bladerunner 2049 . I love the original, and this looks like it retains that film's style and visuals. It's one of the films I've been looking forward to for a really long time. I just hope that Denis Villaneuve doesn't let me down the way Luc Besson did with Valerian . That comes out on October 6th. Also on the 6th is The Mountain Between Us . I love Idris Elba. Kate Winslet's good too, but IDRIS!! It looks pretty intense. Idris is a doct...

I have been a Netflix subscriber for many years, and honestly I'm really impressed with the quality of their originals. I've become a fan of Grace and Frankie, House of Cards, The Ranch, Travelers, The OA, Stranger Things, and probably some others I've forgotten. So when I get an alert that they're releasing a new original, my ears perk up a bit. It could still be crap, but I'll at least give it the benefit of the doubt. They just released a feature-length original called What Happened to Monday. It begins by preying on a lot of fears. Overpopulation produces a worldwide food shortage. Switching to GMOs helps alleviate that shortage, but has the unexpected side effect of boosting fertility, which again, puts a stress on the food supply. To counterbalance this, the government enacts a strict one child policy. Any family with more than one child has to give up the extra so that they can be put into cryosleep, suspended animation until the time comes when they are ab...