Full Cast And Crew

Episode 300: The Lives of Performers. I followed a line from Fame to the documentaries Every Little Step and Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened . Together, they cover so many of the joys and challenges of pursuing a life onstage, and present compelling and hard-won perspectives about the work's peculiar and demanding mix of talent, luck on the audition day, and self-belief in the face...

"I dare you to do an episode about bearer bonds!" -Fraser Rice, Host, 'Wealth Actually' Podcast CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! Many thanks to my guest, Kiah Lau Haslett for her insightful, funny, and (very important for a guy who counts on his fingers) easy-to-understand bearer bond background.  You can read her excellent piece on the history of bearer bonds here. Also, I've changed the name of the podcast....

In this installment of Sacred Cows, I take a fresh and possibly first look at 'Die Hard', John McTiernan's action classic that I can't remember if I ever actually saw before.   It turns out there is plenty of subversive stuff going on beneath all the action, and it's no wonder that the film did such boffo box office...and also all the more disappointing that it went on to spawn such apparently uni...

SEQUELS... In this episode, I take a look at one of the most infamous film debacles of all time: John Boorman's ill-advised, poorly conceived, crowd-displeasing follow-up to one of the greatest and most popular horror films ever made. How could it go wrong? From the start, throughout, and even after release. Let me count the ways. Also, a bit on our current moment of performative reclamation of mo...

One of the great newspaper movies, a great NYC location movie, a great set-dressing movie, a great acting movie...on and on. The Paper deserves more recognition; it's aged particularly well as a love letter to and from a very particular time in the media business.

Summer's rapidly ending and it's time to get back to the FCAC rhythm and routine.  Some thoughts on the passing of Dolly Parton and some UK crime shows I've been watching of late, notably the Apple TV series 'Criminal Record'.

Joan Micklin Silver's 1988 NYC love-letter/romantic comedy Crossing Delancey is one of the superlative NYC films of all time. And watching it today, it's hard not to mourn the loss of the sense of collective experience as New Yorkers she puts onscreen, given our current situation in the City of so much divisive rhetoric and violence. And this film righteously upends the conventions of its genre an...

Go and see 'The Odyssey' in the biggest and best theater you can. You won't regret it. A rollicking great epic cinematic event. Historian Tom Holland interviews Actor Tom Holland on  The Rest is History. The Rest Is History does The Odyssey (the poem).

Michael Ritchie and Redford's still-searingly satiric and spot-on takedown of political operatives and image crafting, peddling, and pandering in the modern campaign-industrial complex speaks louder than ever, given recent events in our body politic.

On a recent trip through Ireland with my daughter, I unexpectedly got back into The Beatles...this is the story.   

Nancy Savoca & Bob Comfort's wonderful jewel-box gem of an American independent film from 1991.  

Sidney Lumet and Naomi Foner (and Executive Producers Griffin Dunne and Lisa Robinson) took what in lesser hands would be a family melodrama and allowed it to become an incredibly mature, layered, complicated story resting entirely on the capable shoulders of its cast of wonderful actors...not least 17-year-olds Martha Plimpton and River Phoenix, a couple off-screen and on.

In this weeks [indistinct chatter] episode: Disclosure Day The Social Reckoning Clarkson's Farm Season 5 Next Week's Episode of Movies I I Haven't Seen. Musings, anecdotes, recriminations.

GO AHEAD AND HATE YOUR NEIGHBOR/GO AHEAD AND CHEAT A FRIEND..... The dramatic and soaring vocals of Coven's Jinx Dawson are forever associated with Tom Laughlin's oddball, enduring, sometimes muddled statement on non-violence and the ways of the White Man and the Natives, 'Billy Jack'. How and why this film struck a nerve upon its director-assisted wide release in 1971 is the stuff of Hollywood le...

Rob Epstein and Richard Schmiechen's 1984 documentary about the life and shocking 1978 killing of San Francisco gay activist and Board of Supervisors member Harvey Milk is one of the great American documentaries and a still-vital example of the power of straightforward documentary filmmaking.  Jon Else's brilliant feature on the film.  

Watch-along by pressing play when I say, or simply enjoy the auditory delights of listening to me comment along with 'Misery' and fill in the anecdotes, line readings, thoughts and questions that arise.

Yeah, so I never saw 'Misery'.  Did I miss anything? Find out in this breezy, bubbly, downright Liberace-esque episode, where, in an admittedly hacky concept, I watch a movie I've never seen and then tell you all about what I thought.  

In the second of my two-parter on Dog Day Afternoon, we get out of the fictional universe of the film and explore the real people behind the characters shown onscreen. John Wojtowicz' life proved truly stranger and more depressingly pedestrian than fiction. So much so that he preferred the fictional version of himself and performed that role for the rest of his life after being released from priso...

Sidney Lumet's 1975 masterpiece of naturalistic filmmaking is many things: a bank robbery procedural, a time capsule of 1970's NYC political and economic movements, a groundbreaking cinematic portrayal of a leading gay character, and maybe the most Brooklyn film of all time. In Episode 1 of my two-parter, I do the usual deep dive into the hows and whys of the ways in which the film still lands emo...

[the week's collected thoughts] Climbing Docs I recommend: The Dark Wizard (HBO) Assault on El Capitan (Prime) Fine Lines (Prime) The Alpinist (Prime) Valley Uprising (Prime) The Summit (Prime) Meru (Prime) The White Mountain (Prime)

In the second of my infrequently recurring series, Sacred Cows, I'm taking a look anew at Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.  

Wrapping up the South Beach sojurn into the world of Miami Vice (at least until the Michael B Jordan/Austin Butler film 'Miami Vice 85' comes out next year) with a revisit of Michael Mann's 2006 film. Mann started from a place of "what if we did Miami Vice for real"...real grimy drug-dealing procedurals, real violence and treachery, the real cost of undercover work. And what if we filmed it during...

Welcome to the existential wormhole that IS [indistinct chatter]...a new regular Friday drop covering topical and episodic ephemera. THIS WEEK:  "Judgement" at Nuremberg indeed; the Hershey biopic you knew you didn't need or want; despite reviews the Michael Jackson biopic will make billions; what do we think about when we think about songs and musicians that we love; Benn Jordan & Rick Beato; Jac...

I've long wanted to revisit some of the great episodes of the Miami Vice TV series, and to find out if it's more influential than truly "great". So I finally did, and the result is a Roland Jazz Chorus-and-pastel-linen-suit-jacket infused trip down memory and musical lane.  In this episode I take a fresh look at the two-part pilot and am reminded of the surprising context of the famous 'In The Air...

Two different films tackle the same subject matter with wildly divergent results.  You might be surprised which one is a vibrant, shockingly modern film that ranks amongst the greatest courtroom dramas ever made.