Runaway locomotives have a long and noble history in movies, and I’ve been a fan at least since the TV movie Runaway! back in 1973. Since then, I’ve enjoyed the premise in films ranging from Silver Streak to Speed to Andrey Konchalovsky’s bizarre 1985 thriller titled, simply, Runaway Train. Along with being lost in the [...]
October at last! It’s my favorite month in the Valley because it’s the one in which summer begins to give up her stubbornness, and my favorite month anywhere because it’s the month of Halloween. So if you want a scary movie to start your Autumn revels, you might consider Buried, now in theaters. It scared [...]
The title of Oliver Stone’s new film is Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. For all I know, that may be true—my relationship with Money, to date, hasn’t been intimate enough to say. If so, then maybe Money should consider sitting through this film. It’s a sequel, of course, to Wall Street, Stone’s 1987 hit. An [...]
A couple of weeks ago I had a strong wish to see a donkey and a howler monkey. This didn’t come out of nowhere. I was in the middle of reading Beatrice & Virgil, Yann Martel’s strange and compelling short novel in which the title characters are, respectively, a donkey and a howler monkey. The [...]
Possibly the finest hour onscreen for Mickey Mouse was “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the segment of 1940’s Fantasia in which he played the title role. The episode is a wordless pantomime, which helps a lot for those of us who find the voice of Disney’s signature rodent grating, to the 1897 orchestral program piece by Paul [...]
Several times in the course of Knight and Day, hero Tom Cruise drugs heroine Cameron Diaz or otherwise causes her to lose consciousness. This happens when the two of them are in a crisis, with the bad guys closing in and the chances of escape unpromising. Then Cameron will black out, and wake to find [...]
Andy Garcia has been around movies since the mid-‘80s, playing gangsters, cops and other steely tough guys. My wife has always had a strong aversion to his work, and while I liked some of his early roles, in The Untouchables, for instance, he’s never been a special favorite of mine, either. There’s something generic and [...]
Out on DVD this week is Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, a sequel to 2006’s Night at the Museum. In the earlier film, which I missed, Ben Stiller played a new night watchman in the American Museum of Natural History in New York who learns that every night, after closing time, a [...]
There are countless well-loved Christmas movies, but Thanksgiving movies are a rarity. I’m not a much of a fan of 1995’s Home for the Holidays, but I often steer people toward What’s Cooking?, Gurinder Chadha’s delightful, too-little-known 2000 multi-cultural Turkey Day comedy. In case you’ve already seen it, though, here are a few more Thanksgiving [...]
Betty Crocker was fictitious, but Chef Boyardee, Marie Callendar and Dr. Pepper were real people. The esteemed microbrew Dave’s Electric Beer, however, has something that these other namesake products don’t: It has two real Daves behind its name. There’s the Dave who created it, and now there’s the Dave who’s keeping the line going. Dave [...]
