Film #80: Skaterdater

Skaterdater is, to my knowledge, the first skateboarding movie ever, and still the best I've seen (Gleaming the Cube and Dogtown and Z-Boys are pretty good, though). Look at how deftly director Noel Black catches the innocent, all-barefoot hot-dogging of this Cali street gang (his steady cameraman Michael Murphy deserves props, too). And that this is a love story, ultimately, captures my

SIDE ORDERS #6

We start off with this edition of SIDE ORDERS with a fascinating, mysterious, graphically boisterous trailer for one of the world's perfect drive-in movies: Monte Hellman's 1971 masterpiece Two-Lane Blacktop. Despite his steady inprovement (there's not a movie I'm looking forward to more than his Lincoln bio-pic in 2009), Steven Spielberg has never helmed a better scene than this transportative

Film #79: Power of Ten

First off, lemme show you some chairs. See if you can recall your ass resting in one of these...Now you see two people. They are husband-and-wife artisans Charles and Ray Eames. First off, may I opine that this must be the coolest couple of all time. They seem so happy working and playing together. Here's another photo:Now, I could pretend I know everything about the design of this

Film #78: Coogan's Bluff

1968's Coogan's Bluff, whether you've heard of it or not, is a deceptively historic movie. It brought Clint Eastwood out of the western milieu he'd been so well-known for through his TV series Rawhide and his Spaghetti Western cycle with Italian director Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad & The Ugly), and into the streets of U.S. cities like New York (

Film #77: Catch-22

Joseph Heller's now-classic 1961 novel was rejected by publishers 15 times. It started out as Catch-14, then Catch-11, Catch-17, and finally, upon publication, Catch-22. In the novel, Yossarian is a nervous WWII pilot who's fed up with risking his life and, by feigning insanity, wants to get drummed out of the force. In Buck Henry's college-try adaptation of this impossible-to-film novel (or

Film #76: Doctor Zhivago

Julie Christie hit it big in 1965. She won a Best Actress Oscar for portraying a sexually adventurous fashion model in John Schlesinger's Darling, but it was her role in David Lean's pristine Doctor Zhivago that really propelled her to stardom that year. Omar Sharif plays the titular doctor/poet who endures wars, winters and his own marital problems in order to spend some quality time with his

The Six Double-Feature Challenge

Okay, as an answer to a "meme" challenge put forth by my fellow LAMBs at The Dancing Image (which started it all), Cinexellence, Lazy Eye Theater, and Out 1, here are six double features of films not available through Netflix (most of these aren't even available on DVD yet) that I either have not seen or saw so long ago that I need to see them again. DOUBLE FEATURE #1: SMART KIDS1984's Old

Film #75: Thanksgiving

In 2002, when I was the Programming Director for North Georgia's Dahlonega International Film Festival (now the Rome International Film Festival), I had to watch hundreds of titles in the span of six months. This resulted in weeks upon weeks of movie-watching, most of it predictably disappointing. (Tip to all festival-bound filmmakers: Actually, with that many movies to watch, a programmer

Film #74: Repo Man

This is the very first major review I ever did, printed on page 9 of Georgia State University's Tuesday Magazine. Date: October 2nd, 1984, very nearly 25 years ago. As I am typing this in, I've made a promise to myself not to add or edit anything unless it's a egregious error. So here's how I wrote when I was one month away from being 18 years old:How many times have you said to yourself "Gee,