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.
Zodiac was my job. It is not yours.
During its theatrical release, David Fincher’s Zodiac was at least partially marketed as some kind of slasher film from the director of Se7en. This probably accounts for its low numbers at the box office, since the slasher movie crowd is definitely not the target audience for this movie, which has more in common with All the President’s Men than it does with Fincher’s 1995 serial killer movie.
I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.
Plato believed that everything in the world has an “ideal universal form” that represents the perfect example of the imperfect things in the real world. For many, The Maltese Falcon is the Platonic ideal of the hard-boiled detective story. True, it’s not the earliest example of the genre, the original novel already having been adapted twice for the screen in the previous decade, but it still contains classic examples of what we consider the basic elements of that genre of film. Most of would now be tired clichés of detective films were either established or popularized by this classic version of Dashiell Hammet’s novel.
You’re sort of the St. Francis of Telegraph Hill.
My brother Brian, who passed away about 11 years ago, would have loved this movie. Not only is it about San Francisco, where he lived, but he knew the subject of this documentary, Mark Bittner, when he was just starting out observing the parrots on Telegraph Hill. That’s not surprising, as birds fascinated Brian, too. When I was little, the side yard of our house contained quite a sizable collection of reptiles and birds, including at least one red tailed hawk at some point. Our backyard also featured a walk-in aviary.
After he moved out on his own, his apartments were rarely without at least one parrot, macaw or cockatoo, not to mention any number of other birds. I distinctly remember going into his bathroom to see the injured seagull he was helping to nurse back to health. This affinity made him somewhat of a kindred spirit to Mark Bittner.
Johnny, you’re not lost. Mother’s here.
Vertigo is probably the archetype for the later Hitchcock films through the mid-60s. The cool, aloof blonde at the center of the story is as dangerous as she is alluring. It is simultaneously Hitchcock’s most romantic film while being primarily concerned with self-destructive obsession. I don’t think any film more accurately summed up the director’s cynical attitude toward male-female relationships. Hitchcock did not believe in happily-ever-after, at least not as this stage of his career.
Look, you work your side of the street, and I’ll work mine.
Because of its legendary car chase through the streets of San Francisco, Bullitt probably has a reputation as a more action-packed movie than it really is. In reality, it’s a fairly realistic and low key cop drama about a witness protection detail that goes horribly wrong.
Bullitt is also the film that makes the best use of the onscreen image of Steve McQueen. He remains, to this day, the quintessential embodiment of “cool.” Almost without effort, he exudes a presence that most actors would kill for and he does it with a minimalist style that sometimes makes Clint Eastwood look like Al Pacino in Heat.
