John Monk Saunders' Flying Death Drive: THE LAST FLIGHT, EAGLE AND THE HAWK, ACE OF ACES, DAWN PATROL (vs. DRACULA)

If you want to scoop deep into the real murky moral ambiguity of war, the heart of the heart of darkness, take to the air and hunt the pre-code 1930s WWI flying ace movies written by John Monk Saunders, where dogfights and aerial maneuvers are performed in the era's rickety biplanes by day and mortifying guilt and despair is drunk away with rousing camaraderie by night. Footage recycled from the silent film Wings (1927- based on Saunders' book)...

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Pharmageddon: JOHN DIES AT THE END (2012) and fuzzy horror

As John Carpenter ages into his RED LINE 7000 phase, a horror genius named Don Coscarelli has quietly stolen the title of the new Hawksian Drive-in fuzzy horror guru. What is fuzzy horror? I can only tell you it encompasses all of Coscarelli's films, the early Sam Raimi, some Cronenberg, John Carpenter til he started doing cable TV, Quentin Tarantino if he ever made a horror movie. It's a loosey goosey termite art digging and goofing around - simultaneously...

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Early Hawks: THE CRIMINAL CODE, TIGER SHARK, CEILING ZERO, BARBARY COAST, ROAD TO GLORY

Much as I love Orson Welles, I've never quite forgiven him for his Cahiers du Cinema interview when he was asked to name the three greatest American directors and answered, "John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." How dare he exclude our greatest director, Howard Hawks? Of course it should be: Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Preston Sturges. Ford was brilliant visually and emotionally but easily mired in his misty-eyed Irish sentiment. He wasn't American...

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"In the words of my father... Oxnard." - Ghoulardi

For the average auteurist critic, deconstructing an opaque work like Paul Thomas Anderson's THE MASTER (2012) tends to involve making connections to the topographical 'conscious' of the artists' life, while the geological 'unconscious' -- the subtextual kernel to which the artist himself is usually blind by definition -- tends to be ignored. And yet it's this exact lower strata where underpinnings are made clear, a strata linked inextricably not...

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