Gene Kelly and Company Engage in Delightful Musical Tomfoolery in On the Town

People who view movies through the lens of searching for "plot holes" or characters exclusively acting within logical frameworks would probably be driven batty by On the Town, a 1949 Gene Kelly musical that also saw Kelly stepping into the director's chair for the first time. You see, On the Town, like most old-school musicals, isn't dictated by logic, the behavior of characters isn't motivated by logic. Everything about the characters, and the movie itself for that matter, is influenced by what could make the most exciting musical numbers. Song and dance are the name of the game for On the Town and why wouldn't you have that be the primary motivators when your movie stars Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra?

The Manchurian Candidate Is The Kindest, Bravest, Warmest, Most Wonderful Movie I've Ever Known In My Life

SPOILERS FOR THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE AHEAD

Returning home from War is always a difficult process and that couldn't be truer for Korean War veterans Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) and Captain Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra). Shaw at least has returned home a hero and with a plush job at a high-profile newspaper to help make his adjustment back to civilian life reasonably easy. Meanwhile, Marco and the other members of the platoon he belonged to begin to have the strangest dreams, ones in which they're all lined up in front a gathering of Communist leaders in order to show off how effectively American soldiers can be brainwashed. In order to demonstrate how deep this brainwashing goes, Shaw kills two of his own men without hesitation as an obedient soldier of enemy forces.

People Are Already At War With Themselves Before Any Weapons Are Fired In From Here To Eternity

Remember Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor? The internet, and also Team America: World Police, have turned that movie into such an endless punchline that it feels almost pointless to critique this motion picture once again, but for the purposes of this review, I feel it is imperative to do so. The feature film that Roger Ebert once accurately described as "...a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle" (God bless Roger Ebert) failed to make a compelling drama all about small-scale human drama that transpired before, during and after the real-life attack on Pearl Harbor for too many reasons to count. There's no single solution to all of them, but if Michael Bay and company wanted a better blueprint for how to make a drama that incorporates Pearl Harbor into its plot, maybe they should have looked to 1953's From Here To Eternity for inspiration?

Five Days Of Crazy Good Music: Settle For Me

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend returns to The CW Friday night, and in honor of its return, I've decided to do a column each weekday this week chronicling noteworthy songs from the first season. 

Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) is very much the focus of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, hence why the show has its title. But one of the best aspects of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend in its initial season is how fully fleshed-out its supporting cast felt from the get-go. Rebecca's best pal Paula is a great example of this trait and Greg (Santino Fontana) is another shining showcase for how well Crazy Ex-Girlfriend depicted that Rebecca was not the only person residing in West Covina (Californiiiiiaaaaa!!) that was a tad bit off-kilter.

The Epic Saga Of Last Christmas

Here's another exciting entry in this Holiday themed column, 25 Days Of Christmas Pop Culture! From now until Christmas Eve, I'll be tackling one piece of Christmas pop culture! It could be a book, movie, TV special, song....so long as it's festive for this time of the year, it'll be checked out in this daily column!

I have many traditions during the holiday season, but perhaps my favorite is one between me and my Mother. We always like to count how many times we hear one particular Christmas song on the radio. Now, it's common, even expected, for Christmas tunes to be repeated on the radio, at truth be told, that's mostly fine. The exception to that rule is Last Christmas, a song played so many times over the course of Christmas time that me and my Mother conjured up the tradition of counting how many times we hear it each year in order to avoid insanity.