Didja like "This Is Spinal Tap," comrades? "Still Crazy" is its companion film, done Brit-style, and with a soulful redemption story at its core. Rife with musician injokes like the former, it follows a reunion of 70's...
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Didja like "This Is Spinal Tap," comrades? "Still Crazy" is its companion film, done Brit-style, and with a soulful redemption story at its core. Rife with musician injokes like the former, it follows a reunion of 70's Brit-rockers 25 years later, which prompt fist pumping yells of "rock and roll!" to be immediately followed by doubling over in back pain, as we geezers are wont.

Great cast with Bill Nighy (better and more authentic than in "Love Actually"), Timothy Spall, Chis Rea amongst others, and a mysterious Syd-Barrett/Richie Manic character buried in ghosts from the past. Everything rings true, rare as we know in films about rockers. Treat yourself to a parallel universe "Spinal Tap."

Gosharooney, we still don't have the word "Coen-esque" in our cinema lexicon. When the brothers tackle comedy, the Capra-esque singularity of their style should conjure all manner of specific and style-centric wonders. Take yer...
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Gosharooney, we still don't have the word "Coen-esque" in our cinema lexicon. When the brothers tackle comedy, the Capra-esque singularity of their style should conjure all manner of specific and style-centric wonders. Take yer iconicness. In "The Hudsucker Proxy," we find Good and Evil literally and figuratively battling for the soul of the titular protagonist (as we found John Goodman playing The Wrath of God in "Raising Arizona.") We find Jennifer Jason Leigh in an absorbing homage to Rosalind Russell's and Katherine Hepburn's best career girls. We find Tim Robbins dissolving into his strange, naive character like melted sugar, a good thing. We find Paul Newman at his stylized best, Charles Durning as a lunatic CEO, even in the afterlife. We have dream sequences, hilarious headlines, visual and dialogue allusions to classic films, high style set dressing that never fails to intrigue, and new LOL laughs every different time one views the darn thing. This film should give the "Ed Wood" film fans of retro nostalgia alongside trenchant modern irony a new obsession. Why this isn't on everyone's Top Ten comedy classics is beyond me. An aside: Wham-o Toys proved incredibly wise in licensing the invention story to this fabricated tale. All p.r. is good p.r.

Man oh man! Folks claim Orson Welles only had one titanic film in him, and they couldn't be more wrong. Since he began his career with his most masterful work, the variants on his genius cinema sense are dismissed as lesser: completely erroneous-...
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Man oh man! Folks claim Orson Welles only had one titanic film in him, and they couldn't be more wrong. Since he began his career with his most masterful work, the variants on his genius cinema sense are dismissed as lesser: completely erroneous- they're just different in their own manner.

I watched "Touch of Evil" (1958) last night as homage to the late Charlton Heston, cast here in his most unlikely role ever (Mexican national) and once again thrilled to the sure touch of Welles, besides its prescience. The film itself has everything a modern viewer could want: sex, drugs, rock and roll, leather-jacketed delinquents, addiction, police procedural, wiretapping, romance, immigration problems, betrayal, duplicity and total grey-area ethos.

How the film looks while Welles juggles these modernistic ingedients is well nigh astounding. Like Kubrick and Kurosawa, every shot matters in its pure visual qualities to draw the viewer into some part of the bigger complications. One of the dang most famous shots ever in the history of all cinema resides here. The opening shot is a masterful four-minute long, without any cuts, wide-angle panning shot of Venice, California standing in for a seedy border town betwixt the U.S. and Mexico (which, pre-gentrification, it matched. It's also historic- half of what's depicted has been since destroyed,) all of which TOTALLY PROMOTES THE STORY. Wowza! Multiple orgasms in movie-making! Every shot's sheer composition is a frame-able winner. The film also stars some of the most popular, A-list actors of the 1950's (Heston, Leigh, Dietrich) alongside Welles' own lumbering misanthrope, ambiguous "Training Day"-worthy cop, and a pre-Robert Altman dialogue technique of people talking over one another's words occasionally, just like in real life. Ten star movie! Rent it ASAP! Even if you can only find the studio-bowdlerized version, it still stands up.

Many great reasons to watch this film about the weirdo world of Arthur Kane: I'ts an accurate documentary on a difficult subject with which to be objective: the post-rock-stardom life of a well known musician who bottomed out. Kane had been by far...
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Many great reasons to watch this film about the weirdo world of Arthur Kane: I'ts an accurate documentary on a difficult subject with which to be objective: the post-rock-stardom life of a well known musician who bottomed out. Kane had been by far the weirdest individual of one of America's weirdest bands, after all.

It provides the only cool footage of legendary USA glamsters of the early 1970's The New York Dolls besides Bob Gruen's excellent "All Dolled Up." It's a true bridge between organized religion and rock & roll craziness, the Apollonian/Dionysian ideal, insofar as the filmmaker, a fellow Mormon like the film's subject, had to travel the same psychic distance to understand Kane as Kane had to in order to understand his newly embraced religion. It shows the New York Dolls reunion in 2003 London, fun in iteself, with footage of an astonishing insight of understanding backstage. Flamboyantly extroverted lead singer David Johanson immediately intuits that he's gone too far teasing Kane about the latter's newly embraced religion, instantaneously does an about face, backs off and leads the band into a pre-gig prayer. I like this.