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…)

I’ve never expected metal ships.

Remakes are rarely a good idea. Remakes of classics are even less likely to be a good idea. They rarely improve on the original and more often, to be blunt, they suck. But up with it I’m willing to put if it means that, from time to time, we get a remake like this one, which takes everything that was good about the original and turns it around so it is relevant to the present.

Don Siegel’s 1956 classic took Jack Finney’s original story and fashioned a highly effective tale of Cold War paranoia. The alien pod people, dutifully conformist and seeking to supplant the individualistic Americans, were perfect analogues for communist infiltration, at least to 1950s audiences. Transplanted to the late seventies, we get not a story about infiltration, but of the loss of identity amongst the anonymity of urban life.

(more…)

That was a stupid, glib, chauvinist remark and I apologize. It is your ass they’re after, and it’s my job to see to it that… I get there first.

Foul Play was Chevy Chase’s first movie after leaving Saturday Night Live and it remains his best film to date. Unlike his SNL and Caddyshack co-star Bill Murray, Chase never really stretched beyond the basic character he plays here, which isn’t that different than the characters he played on SNL.

(more…)