Run, Run, Run As Fast As You Can Away From The Gingerbread Man

It was no surprise to learn that Robert Altman's The Gingerbread Man was plagued by production problems. The movie has all the hallmarks of something that's been tormented by competing creative visions. You don't just get the kind of clumsy editing or erratic tone in Gingerbread Man in just any movie. It could only come out of producers & directors having wildly different visions for how a motion picture should be. Of course, you don't have to know about its behind-the-scenes struggles to know Gingerbread Man is messy. Its journey to the big screen could have been smooth as butter and Gingerbread Man would still be a poor movie.

Feel Free To Do The Monster Mash, Just Don't Watch The Movie MASH

TV shows based on movies usually end up being mere footnotes in the history of the films they spawned from. The Ferris Bueller's Day Off TV show spin-off, that Minority Report TV show (God, I forgot that even happened until I started writing this review), the Napoleon Dynamite TV show, all relics of far more popular features. But there are exceptions to this rule and TV shows based on movies are no exception. Mr. Belvedere and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance, are both more well-known in the modern era for their TV offshoots rather than the movies they originated from and it's likely that the same can be said for the TV show inspired by Robert Altman's 1970 film MASH.

The Godfather Trilogy Comes To An Underwhelming End With The Godfather: Part III

And so, we come to the end of The Godfather trilogy, a saga of films adapting the literary work by Mario Puzo of the same name. Following his tenure helming the lasts two entries in this series, Francis Ford Coppola returns to the directors chair for this final chapter in the Corleone saga, though considering how starved Paramount Pictures is for content these days, I'm preparing myself for an inevitable McG directed reboot of The Godfather to get announced anyday now. For now though, The Godfather: Part III serves as the definitive end of one of the most acclaimed franchises in cinematic history, though this third chapter received initial responses that proved to be far more critical than its predecessors.

Few Sequels Are As Amazing As The Captivating The Godfather: Part II

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #38
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #31 (Tied witb Taxi Driver)   

For years, I've heard the usual picks of when people say best sequels; The Empire Strikes Back, Spider-Man 2, and of course, The Godfather: Part II. That 1974 Francis Ford Coppola has been held up as the paragon of sequel filmmaking for decades now and getting to actually watch it for the first time totally made me realize why The Godfather: Part II is held up in such high stature in discussions of cinema. This thing not only manages to surpass the quality of its already incredible predecessor but it also does a remarkable job of enhancing the world established by the first movie by lending a sweeping mythic quality to the Corleone crime syndicate.

The Brilliant Satire Network Has Become Tragically All Too Relevant In 2017

"What's old is new again" as they say, and while it's not a perfectly equal comparison, it must be said that the world of America in 1976 (the year in which Sidney Lumet's Network was released) does bear a great resemblance to America in 2017. A historically catastrophic President? A recent grisly war that has not produced the sort of triumphant victories America is accustomed to in its foreign affairs? People looking for answers in their entertainment? Some variations of all those ideas always exist in human society but they're particularly potent in both 1976 and in the modern era, making Network one of those amazing movies that's both a perfect time capsule of the era in which it was released and also something that feels incredibly relevant multiple decades after its initial release.

The Godfather Doesn't Just Live Up To 45 Years Worth Of Hype, It Exceeds It

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #37
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #21 (Tied with L'Avventura and Contempt)   

In 1979, director Francis Ford Coppola would unleash a realistic drama called Apocalypse Now that emphasized the realistic emotional and mental turmoil experienced by soldiers dropped into Vietnam. Coppola dove right into a war that had grown bigger than any human being could imagine and dared to imagine what it must be like to live, to breathe, to exist in the midst of all that carnage. Seven years prior, this same guy was responsible for a minuscule indie you may have heard of entitled The Godfather that applied the same thought process of pondering what it's really like to live a life of pervasive violence to the world of mobsters.

The End Is Nigh In The Engrossing Apocalypse Now

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #9
Placement On Sight & Sound 50 Best Movies List: #14

Every single war in human history is a brutal affair from which no participant in it comes away unscathed. But the Vietnam War took on a whole other life of its own that made it a particularly gruesome affair. New innovations in cameras and TV news allowed people to see grisly first-hand footage directly from the battlefield, once that footage was actually allowed to be aired on TV that is. People were getting an up-close glimpse at the harshness of war for the first time and the fact that the Vietnam war ended in a loss for America only added a further layer of tragedy to what was already a cataclysmic affair.

Editorial: What The Screen Actors Guild Nominations Mean For The 2014 Oscars

We're in the thick of awards season now, with tons of awards outlets announcing their nominations for various awards designed to give praise to the best in 2014 cinema. This morning, the Screen Actors Guild announced their nominations for various awards in the realm of acting. Let's take a look at those nominations and how they impact this years Academy Awards race, shall we?

The Judge Review

Insert Courtroom Pun Here

Relics of the past adorn the first frames of The Judge, items meant to be deep symbolism by the end of the cinematic venture. For me, they hold no more meaning after 142 arduous minutes than they did once the film began, but truth be told, that's not a specific knock at the worn baseball glove that opens the movie. Very little of The Judge is actually worth caring about, and those relics are easily some of the misfires smallest offenders in terms of failure.