The Title or Trailer Game IV: Catch it!
Welcome, welcome to The Title or Trailer Gave IV. Here I am with another chance for one of our couples to win absolutely nothing. The rules are simple: if you don't know, flip a coin. Those who refrain from nodding …
Col. Landa vs. the Muppets?
http://sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2012/dec/27/37487/ It's been my good fortune to have made it through only one of the Muppets numerous big screen outings. I could be wrong, but don't they usually contain a scene set inside a movie theatre? Remember how Quentin Tarantino's …
Free movies of the weak: Misérables loves company
http://sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2012/dec/27/37484/ Brace yourself: Les Misérables took in a weekday Christmas record of $18.2 million in the United States and Canada when it opened on Tuesday. People must not have heard that a new Billy Crystal film debuted the same day. …
Dig a hole: Charles Durning
Would characters actors please refrain from dying long enough for me to unwrap my Christmas presents? First Jack Klugman and now Charles Durning. Charles Durning, the man who played Santa Claus five times (It Nearly Wasn't Christmas, Mrs. Santa Claus, …
Dig a hole: Jack Klugman
Jack Klugman played the slob long before his role as TV's Oscar Madison made it fashionable. An image of cardinal significance from the Jewish guilty pleasure, Goodbye, Columbus (1969), instantly made me a Klugman convert. Ben Patimkin (Klugman) is seated …
Everybody loves somebody sometime, except when your cat and Dean Martin die on Christmas Day
She was a full-grown Calico who couldn't have weighed more that 4 or 5 lbs. Aria was adorable, shy, but not so timid that she'd hide the second company came over. She became mine when her owners realized they could …
Christmas jeer
Critic finds lump of coal in stocking
http://sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2012/dec/24/37352/ Look what they're writing to the editor, and at Christmas no less. I almost passed on the Hitchcock movie after reading the Scott Marks' review. What a mistake that would have been. It was a way- above-average movie, as …
Free movies of the week, the Santa Claus edition
Is it wrong to lie to a child by telling them that once a year a sleigh led by 8 reindeer deposits a red-draped fatso bearing a sack of toys on your roof? Don't ask me. Who even knew from …
When in doubt, Stooges!
When in Hollywood, as was the case during the recent Thanksgiving holiday, I feel it my duty to take in at least one 35mm revival. Since it was a holiday weekend, I didn't expect to find much in the way …
Opening this week
http://sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2012/dec/20/37238/ I'm scared. If those zany Mayans are right and the world does come to an end tomorrow, that means the last movie I'll ever see will be Parental Guidance. Or maybe by "the end of the world," the Mayans …
National Film Registry adds another 25 titles
A Penny Marshall for your thoughts
Not only has 2012 meant a bad time at the movies, it appears as if the national Film Registry has taken the year off. If Holly Golightly's waiter was as slow on the uptake as these cats are at the …
No icky girls in George Lucas's Star Wars
Not that I have ever spent time contemplating George Lucas's on-screen treatment of women, but now that you mention it, Marty and John Woo are Jane Campion by comparison. Hell, the Three Stooges offered dames more diversity (and screen time). …
MACSD gives you a chance to "Play with a PGA Tour Pro"
The closest I ever got to a golf course was Paramount's The Caddy. http://sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2012/dec/18/37141/ I don't know a PGA from an X-BOX 360 EIEIO, so it's best that we let the press release (and MACSD's Mike Newton) do most of …
Hanukkah humbug as Lindsay Lohan nixes Bar Mitzvahs
http://sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2012/dec/18/37133/ She's the shikse dream, the kind of farblunget nafke most 13-year-old Jewish boys doven for, yet Lindsay Lohan refuses to do Bar Mitzvahs. Why? The gig couldn't possibly be any more embarrassing than Liz and Dick. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji-cT58rgNc TMZ reports …
Casablanca piano sold at auction
The piano was blue, the profits were gray
A piano used in the iconic film Casablanca didn't fetch the anticipated $1.2 million when it went up for auction at Sotheby's on Friday. The piano was put on the block by a Japanese collector no doubt eager to cash …
Grate cinema: Airport 1975
http://sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2012/dec/16/37012/ For a buck-and-a-quarter apiece, all four of them could be mine. The Airport Terminal Pack (watching them on a computer screen could leave you terminal at your terminal) hit the bottom of my Big!Lots shopping cart in less time …
Passing the digital baton
Out with the Spielberg, in with the DreamWorks at Reading Cinemas Grossmont Center 10
It was a day like any other. I wanted to go to the movies. Go ahead and snicker. You don't want to be around me on the rare occasion where I have to go a week without seeing something projected …
Gobs of Globes
Hollywood Foreign Press announce this year's-z-z-z-z-z-z
Best Picture Drama? Isn't Django Unchained a comedy? Thanks to the knuckleheads at the Hollywood Foreign Press, the recruitment film Act of Valor will forever be referred to as "an award-nominated film." Those are just two of the head-scratching curiosities …
Baby + gun = Facebook fun!
Last night I gave my friend's son a guided tour of the 3 Stooges short, Three Loan Wolves. Dad walked in the second this enchantingly incorrect image hit the screen: http://sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2012/dec/12/36860/ "That should be your Facebook profile photo," my pal …
Give the gift of cinema this Christmas
http://sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2012/dec/10/36726/ It's a bleak holiday movie season at the commercial multiplexes, but there is always something worth your time playing at a Landmark or Reading Cinema near you. Just yesterday I visited the Gaslamp and picked up Dragon, a terrific …