![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
![]() Chet Baker was bodaciously gifted. The James Dean of Jazz had his own style of cool, West Coast Swing. Plus, he was supermodel handsome. Ethan Hawke – the moviestar who plays Chet Baker – isn’t nearly as handsome as Baker was, even allowing for Hawke being in his 40s, playing a music idol in h…
WikChip Video
The real Chet does real Born to Be Blue
|
||||||
![]() A moviestar who directs himself playing an iconic figure in a dramatic biopic has a fool for a leading-man. Don Cheadle provides proof of this as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead, following in the footsteps of Kevin Spacey, who stubbed his toe directing himself as Bobby Darin in the similarly flawe…
WikChip Video
Kind of Blue is Kind of Perfect
|
||||||
![]() How to Steal a Million could just as easily be titled How to Steal a Movielover’s Heart. Audrey Hepburn & Peter O’Toole in their primes, Paris as if in a stylish fantasy, lots of well-earned laughs: it’s a sure thing. Wiliam Wyler famously directed Princess Audrey in Roman Holiday…
WikChip Video
Smashmouth provides ideal trailer track.
|
||||||
![]() 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…
WikChip Video
Václav Havel was a big Zappa fan.
|
||||||
![]() 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…
WikChip Image
Ana de Armas has star quality.
|
||||||
![]() Beatlemania boggles because of the Beatles and the mania around them, especially from ‘62 to ’66 when they exploded on the world and toured to rabid crowds of hormonal girls. Ron Howard’s fun and insightful doc about those halcyon days doesn’t stint on John, Paul, George & Ringo, or the mania…
WikChip Video
"Eric, here is the American public" -...
|
||||||
![]() 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…
WikChip Video
Doug Kenney, comedy genius
|
||||||
![]() One might think Raquel Welch would be in at least several scenes of Bedazzled, given her prominence – ahem – in the poster. You’d be wrong. Thrusting her benchmark boobs into Dudley Moore’s face, with only a bikini top in the way, she looks very big in the poster. Very big. Yet Raquel – #2 "Hot…
WikChip Image
Raquel Welch as Lillian Lust
|
||||||
![]() Not your normal coming-of-age movie, this charming and engaging early-60s period piece seems likely to be remembered as Carey Mulligan’s coming-of-stardom vehicle. Carey who? That’s a question few will be asking after this splendid young star makes another movie or two. But wait, there’s m…
WikChip Image
The real Lynn Barber got "an education."
|
||||||
![]() France et le Québec endured Jacques Mesrine’s spectacular 1960s and 70s criminal career, anointing him a media sensation in the process. The first half of this too-big-for-a-single-movie story gets told in Mesrine: Killer Instinct, the concluding chapters in Mesrine: Public Enemy #1:…
WikChip Video
Anti-hero: "Nobody kills me until I s...
|