Recent Posts

• November 19, 2025

  Scarface (1932)

  The kind of gradual rise and abrupt fall you’ve seen before, but probably worth crediting this for doing it first, or at least the earliest version I can think of. Hawks would have lost his mind over Goodfellas. The Scarface in question is Tony Camonte, who starts out as a second in command for mob boss Johnny Lovo, but he’s really one of those guys with initiative, who gets things done, like killing many, many people and starting wars with the north side of Chicago to try and take over their territory.

• November 15, 2025

  Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

  Second Howard Hawks movie in two days, and the third in about a week. He’s going to pass out my Altman run at this rate. I had no idea what this was about going in, and it sets itself up a little bit as a straightforward romance with Jean Arthur running into Cary Grant shortly after arriving in some remote South American port where he runs an air mail service.

• November 14, 2025

  The Big Sleep (1946)

  Very glad I read the book of this recently because it’s very - famously - convoluted. At least Marlowe always seems to know what’s going on, in contrast to the Elliot Gould Marlowe from The Long Goodbye. They changed some bits and pieces for the movie, but as far as I can tell there are three crime scenarios that overlap in various ways.

• November 11, 2025

  In a Violent Nature

  In 2007, I wrote an article for Cracked.com (still online!, though all the pictures seem to be gone) about easily escapable movie monsters, in which I described the way to escape a Michael/Jason as “maintain[ing] a brisk walking pace in an open area such as a field”. In a Violent Nature is basically rural Friday the 13th, except from the perspective of a Michael/Jason as he walks quietly and very slowly around the woods, butchering people in imaginatively gory fashion. It’s like someone sat down to prove that a large man walking very slowly could in fact catch and kill an entire group one by one.

• November 09, 2025

  His Girl Friday (1940)

  This is a genre I haven’t seen too much of, and doesn’t really exist any more, but I always thoroughly enjoy. That is, the screwball romance, a movie where two people talk at each other at three hundred miles per hour from start to finish while a plot happens somewhere. Cary Grant (have heard of) and Rosalind Russell (have not) are the talkers in question. He is a newspaper editor and she was both his star reporter and wife, and is now neither. She comes to tell him she’s marrying some other dude, tomorrow, so he tricks her into sticking around because he knows she can’t resist a good story. The story is that of Earl Williams, on death row and due to be executed, and the sheriff and mayor are pushing it through because he supposedly killed a black cop, and they don’t want to lose the black vote.