My 1/2-Ass Movie Blog

 Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, Keith Morris, H.R. Dir. Paul Rachman, Sony Pictures Classics As an '80s teen, I loved punk rock. First Wave acts like Sex Pistols and Ramones, hardcore bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Husker Du - didn't matter to me. If it sounded as angry as I felt, if it moved fast and howled like a cat in heat, if it pissed off my parents or any authority figure close to hand, I loved it and I wanted more. Many of my friends felt much the same but, unlike me, they took it further. Much further. They went to the Jockey Club, a one-time nightclub/casino in Newport, Ky., and hung out, underage, any night there was a punk show, which was most nights. They got into booze, drugs, sex. They ran away from home, got bounced into early treatment cults like Straight, Inc., dropped out of high school, got pregnant, arrested, and in a few cases dead. Not all of them, of course, but the Greater Cincinnati punk rock scene in the 1980s consisted largely of the kids ...

 THE CLINT EASTWOOD COLLECTION A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY HANG ' EM HIGH When I started this blog in January 2021 I had been collecting and writing about movies for about 3&1/2 years on Facebook. Hundreds of those reviews went with other Fb accounts - I had a genius for locking myself out of my own account for awhile - which a friend and I thought I'd be able to easily access and port over to the blog. We were not correct. Though a relatively simple solution likely exists, I've had the blog for six months and I'm not finding it. Which means I'm going to have to replace that content with new writeups. Which means re-watching a lot of movies. If I'm going to do that, I may as well go back to the start and do some writing about the first two years of collecting, when I made Clint Eastwood a primary focus, buying any movie he starred in, directed, or produced. Last week, I watched all eight movies from th...

 Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Mary Louise Wilson, John Malkovich, Karl Urban, Helen Mirren. Dir. Robert Schwentke, Summit, 2010 What is my operative philosophy of comic book/superhero movies? What's my ultimate position? The bottom line? Death of cinema or savior? Um. No. Yes. Maybe. I like movies. I like stories. If a movie tells a story that looks and sounds like something I'd like to see, I try to see it. If it doesn't, I only try to see it if a number of people online say, no, check it out, critics got it wrong. Over the last decade plus, comic book/superhero movies do the business, so I see those movies when I feel curious about them. I understand why Martin Scorsese doesn't regard them as movies, and why fans don't regard Martin Scorsese as human. I get why people see the end of all things in the MC & DCEUs, but I also know TV and cable and the vcr were going to put Hollywood out of business in the '50s and we're still seeing Hollywood movie...

 Joan Allen, Jeff Bridges, Gary Oldman, William Petersen, Sam Elliott. Dir. Rod Lurie, Dreamworks, 2000 If my tendency to overshare has not made it clear, let us establish that yours truly has yet to entirely grow up. I'd love to say that explains my boyish charm, but it also explains my galloping naivete and my stubborn resistance to common sense. I hold onto things. Memories, people, ideas. My childhood belief in these persisted well past the point where a little skepticism would have been no bad thing. The last few years ended most of my willful naivete, my childish idealism. Unfortunately, the Current Guy, while tonally a galaxy away from the Former Guy, has not so far restored my faith in the civics-class ideals to which I clung. The Former Guy sinned by doing. The Current sins by not doing. Neither has helped stop my reluctant emergence into how shit really is. All of which is to say I found myself choked up at a couple points in Rod Lurie's 2000 political thriller,...

 Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Murray Hamilton, Lorraine Gary. Dir. Steven Spielberg, Universal, 1975 Jobeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Zelda Rubenstein, James Karen. Dir. Tobe Hooper, 1982 I stood on a downtown Cincinnati street, watching a car such as I had never imagined cruise toward me. In my memory it's a convertible '59 Caddy, with the insane fins, but it must have been a flatbed truck, because where would the shark have fit otherwise? On, or in, its back a huge fiberglass shark burst from huge fiberglass waves, its toothsome mouth open and swallowing a huge fiberglass pair of women's legs, the rest of her further inside, presumably. That is not a hallucination. Look it up. In spring of '75, ahead of the release of Steven Spielberg's JAWS, Universal Studios hired out vehicles to drive the streets of various markets and promote the movie with displays such as I have described. I was seven years old. Already a movie fan, I remember think...