The numbers of the 2010 Haitian earthquake are heartbreaking: between 220,000 to 316,000 dead, and roughly 280,000 residences and commercial buildings destroyed or severely damaged. The debris caused by the earthquake is stag... more
Before I ever saw Dario Argento's Suspiria, I knew the film for its sound. It was back in 1996 in high school and I had yet to find a video store in my area that carried a copy of the film. I'd read up a lot on Argento and Go... more
I didn't get to see as many films at the Brooklyn Film Festival as I'd hoped to due to other obligations and personal matters, but I did get a chance to catch a few more shorts last weekend, two of which preceded the document... more
Time to out myself: while I believe that income inequality is a serious issue, I could never get fully behind Occupy Wall Street. I suspect this makes me the unfortunate petty bourgeoisie of today's educated liberals, and yet... more
Certain historical events unfold when you're young, but you don't even realize how important they are until you're much older. I remember seeing the tank man of Tiananmen Square on TV, for instance, and the toppling of the Be... more
At a press conference today in New York, Jackie Chan mentioned that he is currently preparing a stage musical based on his own life. Adapted from his 1998 autobiography I Am Jackie Chan, the musical would chronicle his c... more
With Man of Steel coming out this week, it just makes sense to highlight something with Superman. And where better than the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons? These are bona fide classics that feature some of the best Superman... more
If someone were to tell you that Buck Angel is a porn star, you'd assume he does gay porn. Just look at the picture of him in the header image. He looks like a butch guy, and a name like Buck Angel is a gay porn star name par... more
Pussy Riot was back in the news following the 11-day hunger strike of Maria Alyokhina. Alyokhina started the hunger strike on May 22 to protest the conditions of her imprisonment, which she claimed turned other inmates agains... more
The dog on the left is dead. The owner had the dog professionally stuffed in order to cope with the loss. The dog on the right (alive) shares in my initial reaction to this scene from the documentary Furever: detached yet rum... more
Whenever I have the spare cash, I like to go grab a good cocktail. It's never to get blottoed since you can't drink craft cocktails on a budget. I do it to unwind with good company. There's been a resurgence in craft cocktail... more
There was a point in the mid-to-late 1990s when a bunch of lesser filmmakers tried to make movies like Quentin Tarantino. It was the style of Tarantino -- the pop-culture savvy, the soul music, the violence, the coolness, the... more
Douglas Tirola's documentary Hey Bartender looks at the rise of the craft cocktail and the role of the bartender in society. Two of the bartenders at the center of the film are Steve Schneider and Stephen Carpentieri. Even th... more
In four decades of filmmaking, Brian De Palma has made some good movies (e.g., Carrie, Carlito's Way, Blow Out) and some stinkers (e.g., The Bonfire of the Vanities, Mission to Mars). Passion looked like a potential retu... more
I was only eight years old when Morton Downey Jr. was at the height of his popularity (roughly 1988-1989). It would be at least another five years before I got into Downey's protégés like Richard Bey and Jerry S... more
One of the first shots of the documentary Dragon Girls is part David Lean and part Busby Berkeley. From a high angle we watch as thousands of children run in ordered rows and columns with their arms out, stopping on a di... more
This week, the Lighthouse International Film Festival kicks off in Long Beach Island, New Jersey. The festival will run from June 6th to June 9th. Though I usually focus on NYC-based festivals, I wanted to highlight this one ... more
Over the weekend I caught five short films at the Brooklyn Film Festival. One called Good Grief played before the feature-length documentary Furever (review of that later in the week); the other four (Love Letter, The Phantom... more
Roger Ebert would have turned 71 this month. His passing has left a hole in the film critic community, which doesn't seem to have a central public figure anymore. There's A.O. Scott of The New York Times, of course, but he do... more
Two things struck me when the opening credits of Black Out came on: 1) there was a lot of style and flash in a good way, and 2) the festival's digital copy was low res. As the text appeared, so did fuzzy squares and breaks in... more
I haven't seen Steven Soderbergh's Kafka (1991) in at least 15 years. I was in high school at the time and had just started reading Franz Kafka (like any lit geek of that age), and was intrigued by that Kafka movie on VH... more
The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post. -- George Bernard Shaw Epistolary stories are fascinating to me given what's in the collected correspondence and what's left out. As letters go back and fo... more
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