Monday: Vertigo
Halloween might be over, but that doesn’t mean the scares have to stop. We wouldn’t go so far as to call Vertigo a “horror movie,” but Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock ratchets the tension to such unbearable levels that parts of it are more terrifying than anything you’d see in whatever torture porn Read More
Monday: How I Met Your Mother
Is Monday night the new Thursday night? Tonight brings the season premiere of House, a new Gossip Girl, a two-hour Heroes (yep, that show is still on the air) and the launching of the CBS Monday night comedy block, which includes the series premiere of Jenna Elfman’s Accidentally Read More
Jimmy Stewart never struck us as all that nice. There were, sure, the poems he’d read about pints of milk or his dog named Beau on Johnny Carson. (Sample verse: "He bit lots of folks from day to day,/ The delivery boy was his favorite prey.") But that was when he was so Read More
Monday: Lost
Long before the Dharma Initiative, Widmore Industries and The Oceanic Six, there was the first season of Lost. It was a simpler time, when Michael Emerson was just that guy from a few episodes of Law & Order and not a passive-aggressive criminal mastermind with a couple of Emmy nominations … but Read More
This Sunday, TCM’s showing 24 hours of Paul Newman, and movie nerds, like football fans, probably have their tailgating all planned out. Slurp up spaghetti and Newman’s Own Sockarooni sauce while Hud drinks and disappoints (6 p.m.). Microwave a bag of Newman’s Own Light Butter Popcorn as Cool Hand Luke chokes down 50 hardboiled eggs Read More
We’re feeling a little ‘duh’ this afternoon after reading news that a lawsuit has been brought against Stephen Spielberg, DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures claiming that their film Disturbia (the surprise 2007 hit starring Shia LaBoeuf as a teen voyeur) ripped off the Hitchcock masterpiece Rear Window. The L.A. Times (via the AP) reports Read More
Another good way of killing time: doing random YouTube searches for old movie scenes and trailers. And the good folks over at the Times Online have just given us a hit list. Earlier this week the London paper posted Alfred Hitchcock’s 50 most memorable moments, complete with a little description of each and Read More
Monday: Notorious
Some say Rear Window. Others, Vertigo. We say Notorious when asked to name our favorite Hitchcock film. Ingrid Bergman plays a boozy, sad beauty who must redeem herself—and her family name—by turning spy for government agent Cary Grant. The action takes place in 40s Rio de Janiero, where Bergman must marry a suspicious Read More
D.J. Caruso’s Disturbia, from a screenplay by Christopher Landon and Carl Ellswoth, based on a short story by Mr. Landon, was described to me by a colleague (before I caught a studio screening) as a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) for today’s teenage audiences. About all I can say after one viewing of Read More
Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd, from a screenplay by Eric Roth, has been described as “The Godfather of spy movies,” which is reasonably accurate as far as the depiction of violence is concerned, as well as the emphasis on ethnicity, which in The Good Shepherd is mostly multi-generational American ruling-class WASP, while in The Read More
