Have we got a tough guy here? Have we got a tough guy from the streets?

In this hipster overrun time of ours, we've been slowly losing our dangerous man persona, ever since THE GRADUATE made it hip to be sullen. Men of earlier decades were real, complex, intelligent and tough: John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, James Caan, Brando,  Lee Marvin, Sinatra, Bronson, Bogart... badasses not afraid to show intellect and wit, to pick fights and help others with their brains, fists and--when needed--guns.We've still got some tough...

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Bright Lights Film Journal #67

The inestimable Bright Lights Film Journal has received a swell make-over, so if you're having trouble finding it, just go here.To give you some background on this amazing and long-running magazine, definitely check out Matthew Sorrento's interview with BL editor Gary Morris. Finding Bright Lights can be like coming home after years of wandering. If you like first-rate film writing mixed with freestyle cultural associations and psychosocial analytic...

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VOODOO MAN: Patron Saint of Megalomaniacal Children and Torpor!

Notoriously absent from the world of DVD... until now, comes VOODOO MAN (1944). The missing link in the chain of strange, boring, inept but irresistibly fascinating, Brechtian and hilarious horror films from poverty row studio Monogram, usually starring John Carradine, George Zucco, Bela Lugosi or in rare and precious instances such as this, all three. The wartime era was a lean one for horror films, with the war overseas far more horrific than...

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Sprays of Heaven: IN THE DUST OF THE STARS (1976)

"Help means so much more than giving you weapons."  What happens when a peaceful rocket full of sexy East Germans are lured to a western colonized planet and are subject to drugs (the red spray is "spicy" while the blue spray is "sweet"), erotic dancing and orgiastic staring contests?  Das ist die frage in Gottfried Kolditz's colorful, cool and just plain weird film, 1976's IN THE DUST OF THE STARS (Im Staub der Sterne). Classy is the word...

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The Bulls Fighter

There's tough guys, and then there's Charlie Bronson. Johnny Cochran fought the law and the law won, but Bronson has fought the law for three decades and it seems to be a bloody tie. All the bulls can do is keep him locked down - the minute he's free, he starts a ruckus. And it's a bleedin' true story! He wanted to be famous and he is, but the whys go unanswered. The film's slow mo strut and staggering formalist tracking shots, timed to great classical...

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The Wuss in the Willows

Back in November 08, I lamented how our once-golden child, Leo Di Caprio--he who wowed us in WHAT'S EATING GILBERT GRAPE and the BASKETBALL DIARIES--had fallen into the Hollywood aging child actor baby bear trap (i.e. the baby face that lifted them to fame by allowing them to play characters younger than they [and to attract 'tweener girls] becomes a curse when they try to embody macho action heroes) and had yet to emerge. Where other actors in his...

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"Anything" goes in JEOPARDY (1953)

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Thanks / for the Lucky Strikes

(LSMFT = Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco)The title of this blog entry will be familiar to Jack Benny fans, as one of the "commercial song parodies" with which his Sportsmen Quartet slyly ribbed and celebrated their sponsor, Lucky Strike, that fine cigarette that 4 out of 5 doctors prefer... so round, so firm, so fully packed. So free and easy on the draw! Bob "What the hell am I dead for?" Hope was  a frequent guest star on Benny's show and...

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Best of 2009

1. THE HURT LOCKERdir. Kathryn Bigelow I am imagining Kathryn Bigelow (above) as the Evelyn Mulray to Howard Hawks' Noah Cross and I mean that in the best possible way because I revere Hawks uber alles and this would be perhaps a non-incestuous version, one with more fishing and hunting and target practice. I'm sure Hawks would have called HURT LOCKER "a damn good picture" and Bigelow "a damnned good-looking girl."2. ANTICHRIST dir. Lars Von...

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