|John Costello| Dear H., I’m writing you about a work featuring a bold woman, a man with a fast vehicle, and an ominous edifice, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, in the hope that I can relate your interest in that book to another work. You love the social dynamics of Regency Britain, the… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| “It’s Bleak” | The 1970 Peter Boyle film Joe is not part of our Bleak Week programming—though you’d be forgiven if you thought it was. Joe, which we programmed to kick off our Cantankerous Peter Boyle series, follows a wealthy advertising executive (Dennis Patrick) Continue reading
|Jillian Nelson| Rogue One follows a ragtag group of Rebels who fight to obtain Imperial Death Star plans that reveal a self-destructing weakness in its system. At its core, the film is a story about finding hope in revolution against fascism. It explores this theme through three character… Continue reading
|John Costello| I’m supposed to write about the problem with science fiction tropes—mainly space Westerns—but I keep thinking about Peter Boyle’s portrayal of Sheppard in Outland (1981). Sheppard spends much of his time playing golf in his office, looking like he can’t afford a haircut, a beard trim… Continue reading
|Reid Lemker| Let’s play a game. I am thinking of a movie…It has a bit of action, some guns, a bit of drama, and a dash of comedy. This movie I am thinking of came out in the early 1970s and stars James Caan. Our hero is pitted against a gang of bad guys, one of them wears glasses and… Continue reading
|Phil Kolas| The allure of mystery is inescapable in the upcoming quadruple lineup for the 80s ACTION EXTRAVAGANZA II: THE QUICKENING. We do not actually know what the movies in question will be. I tried to find any info about the first extravaganza, but even… Continue reading
|Allison Vincent| As a kid growing up at the tail end of the 80s through the 90s with access to cable and an unrestricted library card, it was pretty easy to consume the media I wanted without too much interruption from my parents. My dad was lax, to say the least, when it came to… Continue reading
|Dan McCabe| If I asked someone to name ten action movies, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the named films were released in the 1980s. The Terminator (1984), First Blood (1982), Die Hard (1988), Top Gun (1986), Aliens (1986), Red Dawn (1984), Predator (1987), Lethal Weapon (1987)… Continue reading
|Matt Clark| The crime film and the heist picture have been integral to American cinema since its earliest days: gangster films of the 30s, noir of the 40s and 50s, even silent pictures like The Great Train Robbery (1903) still reverberate powerfully through our shared cinematic vocabulary… Continue reading
|J.R. Jones| George V. Higgins was a crime writer’s crime writer, which may be another way of saying he never enjoyed the same level of success as some of his fans. Elmore Leonard—whose fiction inspired Get Shorty (1995), Jackie Brown (1997), and Out of Sight (1998)—remembered Higgins… Continue reading
