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![]() An all-time great college comedy, EWS!! riffs on pre-PC male privilege in all its semi-decadent glory. It imagines a nationally-ranked baseball team at a third-tier Texas college – the Bad Habit Bears, basically. As a guy who was a sophomore in 1980, when Richard Linklater’s movie is set, I …
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Rappers Driving
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![]() Even the great Maggie Smith can’t save The Lady in the Van. Let’s repeat: Dame Maggie can’t save it! Perhaps that’s because she plays an angry old woman who’s beyond saving, sad as that common sight is. Disclosure: I saw The Lady in the Van on the little tilt-down screens of a 737. It kind…
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Dame Maggie gets wasted.
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![]() Now this is what a marvelous blockbuster should be. No surprise, as Marvel Entertainment always delivers. And talk about a monumental origin story, one that also harks back to existing plots! Wow. Plus, given that all the X-Men come out to play – all of them – it’s also a sequel in a way. Double …
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JLaw's sexy mutant goes nightstalking.
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![]() Eat That Question is well titled. Frank Zappa in His Own Words is FZ waxing loquacious, repeatedly. Zappa, the pugnacious, contradictory and iconoclastic rockstar, indeed the consummate rockstar, trades heavily on his privilege and arrogance, by turns funny, shocking and ridiculous, a Trump t…
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Václav Havel was a big Zappa fan.
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![]() Coke culture from its Eighties heyday comes alive in The Infiltrator, a biopic that profiles the Medellin Cartel’s apparent money launderer. This guy lived la vida loca in all its money grubbing, slimy glory. Bryan Cranston is nails as real-life U.S. Customs agent Robert Mazur, who went de…
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Cranston talks Infiltrator with Colbert
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![]() Lost in America’s reputation exceeds its reality. Modestly funny in 1985, its four memorable scenes live on in the mind’s eye, but fail to sustain this mere 91 minute movie. Turns out its nest-egg wasn’t enough. Not that it doesn’t have a great line here and there.
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"Oh I know, you mean the $100,000 box."
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![]() Hands of Stone is a ham-fisted biopic of boxing great Roberto Durán. Raging Bull it’s not, notwithstanding Robert De Niro in a major role. That said, it does provide clear insight into Durán’s impoverished childhood, rise to prominence and fall from grace after his “No Mas” capitulation to Suga…
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Ana de Armas has star quality.
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![]() Who’s on first? Tom Cruise to start, until Dustin Hoffman outshines him in an acting duet for the ages. Rain Man is all that and much more, a wonderful movie full of charm, humanity and insight. It won the Big Four Oscars in 1989 – Best Picture, Best Actor (Dustin Hoffman), Best Director and Be…
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The Oscars were once revered.
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![]() National Lampoon – the maidenhead of post-modern comedy – was the ultimate risqué magazine for “well-to-do nobodies” in the Seventies. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon lists in its title four conditions associated with the Lampoon, another being being ROFL. This gr…
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Doug Kenney, comedy genius
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![]() Fun for kids of all ages, Ferris Bueller’s harmless hi-jinks, energetic panache and gentle farce make it the ultimate ditch day movie. Matthew Broderick will be forever associated with the title character, a charming conniver prone to belting out a Beatles song in the middle of a parade. Jo…
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Twist and Shout Ferris
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