Archive for April, 2007

The Hunt for Red October (1990)

Monday, April 16th, 2007

Russians don’t take a dump, son, without a plan.

How quickly did we leave the Cold War behind? The dust had barely settled on the fall of the Berlin Wall when this 1990 Tom Clancy adaptation was treating the subject like a period film. Of course, the world had changed so drastically since the novel’s 1984 publication that it was impossible to view the material as current events.

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Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Believe it or not, those potheads who sat around all day back in the seventies, listening to Led Zeppelin IV or Dark Side of the Moon, actually contributed something worthwhile to Western Civilization when members of the bands Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd used some of the profits from their albums to help finance a little gem of cinematic anarchy known as Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

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The Abyss (1989 & 1993)

Wednesday, April 4th, 2007

It’s not easy being a cast-iron bitch. It takes discipline, years of training… A lot of people don’t appreciate that.

The Abyss

James Cameron’s deep sea science fiction tale is one of those rare instances of a director revisiting a finished work and genuinely improving the film. The 1989 theatrical release was marred by an abrupt, confusing ending that was the product of Cameron removing almost an entire storyline to bring the film down to a more commercial 146 minute running time. This drastic surgery earned it some lukewarm reviews when it first hit theaters.

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