Directed by Michael Hoffman. Screenplay by Robert Harling & Andrew Bergman, story by Harling. I dig the opening credits – they’re like if a Saul Bass title sequence was eightified and/or done in the style of Roy Lichtenstein (though…minus the onomatopoetic text). We begin at the 32nd Daytime Television Awards (I guess we couldn’t get […]
Directed & written by Greg Mottola. Fun fact! 18 years after this film was made, Mottola would reunite with star Hope Davis for an episode of “The Newsroom” (the Season 1 finale, called “The Greater Fool”). The film opens on Thanksgiving night, with Stanley Tucci & Hope Davis driving past a place called the Walt […]
Directed by Stephen Frears. Screenplay by Donald E. Westlake, from the novel by Jim Thompson. Opening title card: “I’ve wined and dined on mulligan stew and never wished for turkey, As I hitched and hiked and grifted too from Maine to Albuquerque…” From “The Lady is a Tramp” (Rodgers & Hart) (Also, for what it’s […]
Directed by Ted Demme. (…A film director hailing from New York with the last name ‘Demme’? Yep, that’s correct – he was the nephew of Oscar-winning, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) director Jonathan.) Written by Scott Rosenberg. Here’s the tale: semi-struggling freelance musician (he plays the piano) Willie Conway (Timothy Hutton) returns to his […]
Directed by Edward Zwick. Here’s the thing about Edward Zwick – in the ’80s, back to back, he directed ABOUT LAST NIGHT (1986) and GLORY (1989). Not sure about y’all, but that’s all the information I need to understand him also directing this film. I mean…somehow, that just makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Screenplay by […]
Original German title: “Lola rennt.” Written & directed by Tom Tykwer. Opening text: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” — T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” and: “After the game is before the game.” — […]
Written & directed by the Wachowski Brothers (now Lilly & Lana Wachowski). This is a re-watch. As anyone who scans down the list of movies covered in posts on this blog can likely tell – I am not a big fan of Sci-Fi films, and watch them pretty infrequently. (I am not easily convinced by […]
Directed by Gil Junger. Screenplay by Karen McCullah & Kirsten Smith; story & characters (somewhat loosely) derived from “The Taming of the Shrew” by William Shakespeare. This is a re-watch. The opening credits couldn’t be any more ’90s, with the Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week” blaring and the florescent-colored, scratchy-illustration-style text for the titles. Ha! Every […]
Directed by Jerry Zaks. Screenplay by Scott McPherson – from a play by Scott McPherson. Very sadly, this is the only film credit McPherson ever received – as he’d passed away from AIDS about four years before this film even came out – at the (way, way too young) age of 33. The wordless opening […]
Directed by Michael Mann. Screenplay by Mann & Christopher Crowe, adapted by John L. Balderston, Paul Perez, & Daniel Moore from the (very famous) novel by James Fenimore Cooper. Set in 1757, in upstate New York. The opening-credit backdrop shot of the fog-cloaked mountains is drop-dead beautiful & reminds me a lot of many of […]
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