Celluloid Heroes

You won’t make much money, but you’ll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra.

On Thanksgiving Night in 1976, the legendary rock group known simply as The Band said farewell to touring with a party at San Francisco’s legendary Winterland Ballroom. 5,000 turkey dinners were served. There was ballroom dancing and a poetry reading. Oh, yes, there was also a concert featuring The Band, joined by such obscure musical nobodies as Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Bob Dylan, just to name a few. To top it off, Martin Scorcese was on hand to film the whole thing. The end result has been called the greatest concert film of all time. I’m not sure that it quite rates that title but it is very good and a priceless snapshot of rock music at that point in time.

(more…)

Judges, lawyers, cops, politicians. They stop bringing dope into this country, about a hundred thousand people are gonna be out of a job.

With the creative pedigree behind this film, if it had merely been good, that would have been a tremendous disappointment. The writer, director and two stars have no fewer than five Academy Awards between them and none of them earned cheaply. It should come as either no surprise or a great relief that American Gangster more than delivers on every promise made by the names in the credits.

(more…)

They can fly rings around the moon, but we’re years ahead of ’em on the highway.

What was it in the water in 1977 that directors of classic sci-fi movies couldn’t leave well enough alone? Long before George Lucas had turned the words “Han Shot First” into a fanboy battle cry, Steven Spielberg had already done a major facelift on his landmark UFO film. When Close Encounters was in production, Spielberg was aiming for a summer, 1978, release. Columbia Pictures, on the verge of bankruptcy, forced him to finish the movie for the fall of 1977, leaving unfilmed several of what he thought were key scenes.

(more…)