Welcome to BlogHub: the Best in Veteran and Emerging Classic Movie Blogs
You can rate and share your favorite classic movie posts here.
You can rate and share your favorite classic movie posts here.
DC: The New Frontier (2004)d
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 21, 2020
Darwin Cooke’s most impressive achievement with The New Frontier isn’t the art, which is a mix of sublime, grandiose, muted, and bombastic, or keeping track of all the characters (there have to be hundreds), but the voice he finds for characters. He starts big, with Losers member Johnny Cloud narra read more
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s01e08 – Away with the Fairies
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 21, 2020
Once again I stand corrected as to what “Miss Fisher’s” needs to do to have a successful episode. This one has a case very tied to Essie Davis’s past—victim Heather Bolton was one of Davis’s teachers, prime suspect Deborah Kennedy is a mentor—has lots of guest stars (Phryne Fellow Philippe read more
Emma (2020, Autumn de Wilde)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 20, 2020
If IMDb is correct, there have been only ten other adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma, and I’m including the modernizations. So it’s not so much Emma is oft-adapted, maybe just it’s got a very memorable story. Memorable enough even I was anticipating how—oh, wow, it’s director de Wilde’s read more
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s01e07 – Murder in Montparnasse
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 20, 2020
So this episode takes everything I said—based on the last two—was needed to make a great “Miss Fisher’s.” Turns out I’m completely wrong, because Murder in Montparnasse doesn’t just break (most) of my rules, it breaks my bigger, obvious rules for melodramatic plotting. It ties together read more
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s01e06 – Ruddy Gore
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 19, 2020
It’s an excellent episode and maybe the one most interested in the murder investigation. There aren’t any substantial subplots—Ashleigh Cummings has to deal with Hugo Johnstone-Burt being a lug of a boyfriend and not a romantic daydream like stage actor Alex Rathgeber, who’s actually a right read more
The Appaloosa (1966, Sidney J. Furie)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 19, 2020
The Appaloosa could be worse. Director Furie apes styles he doesn’t understand how to use—his Leone-esque angles, the Acid Western—with what’s a fairly traditional Western, albeit just with a Mexican supporting cast. Well, okay, so Marlon Brando is the only gringo playing a gringo. All the other read more
Frasier (1993) s01e12 – Miracle on Third or Fourth Street
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 19, 2020
It’s a Christmas episode and a good one. Just the right amount of humor and heartwarming, with Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) ending up alone on Christmas and in need of some good fellowship as it turns out. Everything seems to be going swimmingly for Grammer’s first Christmas with Mahoney in Seattle, read more
Champagne for Caesar (1950, Richard Whorf)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 18, 2020
What’s so frustrating about Champagne for Caesar is how little the film really would’ve need to do to be a success. It just needed a rewrite. Someone to come in and fix Hans Jacoby and Frederick Brady’s script, which is usually fine but they really can’t figure out what to do with Celeste Holm. read more
What We Do in the Shadows (2019) s02e02 – Ghosts
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 18, 2020
Ghosts is a very well-balanced “What We Do in the Shadows,” meaning all three vampires—Kayvan Novak, Matt Berry, Natasia Demetriou—get their own showcases and there’s some left over for Mark Proksch’s energy vampire. Not a lot for Harvey Guillén, but he got last episode. The episode starts read more
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s01e05 – Raisins and Almonds
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 18, 2020
After the lackluster previous episode, the show’s back on track with this one, which almost showcases what material “Miss Fisher’s” works best with. For instance, there’s not time for the whole supporting cast. Nathan Page doesn’t get a whole bunch to do this episode, but he gets to do all read more
What We Do in the Shadows (2019) s02e01 – Resurrection
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 17, 2020
So, there’s a lot to say about “What We Do in the Shadows”’s return, like how they figured out an amazing way to keep growing Harvey Guillén’s vampire hunter arc (as he is a vampire’s familiar) and how the show uses a time jump (summer is over, so we get some exposition—unclear if the read more
Frasier (1993) s01e11 – Death Becomes Him
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 17, 2020
I’ve got to stop being so surprised when Kelsey Grammer basically gets an episode to himself. It’s his show, it just happens to have a phenomenal supporting cast. I was going to say scene-stealing but they aren’t. No one crowds anyone out in “Frasier,” it’s exceptionally balanced. This episode read more
Barry Lyndon (1975, Stanley Kubrick)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 17, 2020
The first half of Barry Lyndon, very nicely delineated on screen with a title card and then an intermission, is a black comedy. The second half is a tragedy. The epilogue explicitly reconciles the two, but there’s also Michael Hordern’s narration, which does the most expository work of anything read more
All Rise (2019) s01e20 – Merrily We Ride Along
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 16, 2020
This episode’s credited writers, Gregory Nelson and Aaron Carter, have written episodes before but they mustn’t have stood out enough I was going to remember the writers. The writing only stands out this episode because there’s a great courtroom scene with Jessica Camacho cross-examining a witness, read more
Frasier (1993) s01e10 – Oops
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 16, 2020
It’s another strong episode. “Frasier”’s combination for success is the scripts—in this case, from writers Denise Moss and Sy Dukane—the supporting cast, and then the bigger name guest stars. Because whether you know his name or not, John Glover is a name guest star. He’s in this episode read more
Sleeper: Season One (2003-04)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 16, 2020
Some of Sleeper doesn’t age well. There’s a whole plot line about the secret society running the world and, in 2020, it seems like a very dated trope. To be fair, it was dated in 2003 when Sleeper came out, but writer Ed Brubaker was at least utilizing the trope to sabotage it. There’s also the read more
In the Gloaming (1997, Christopher Reeve)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 15, 2020
In the Gloaming is a qualified success. If you’re trying to go for humanizing a guy dying of AIDS while his upper middle class White yuppie family is slow to realize he’s a dying person who they probably ought not to avoid because they’ll regret it… it does that job. Gloaming is an hour-long read more
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012) s01e04 – Death at Victoria Docks
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 15, 2020
This episode lacks the spark of the previous ones; it’s still solid and well-acted—even by the less sparkly supporting characters—and has nearly all the supporting favorites back (meaning aunt Miriam Margolyes and Essie Davis’s ward, Ruby Rees), but the main plot is a bit of a shrug. Also—the read more
Frasier (1993) s01e09 – Selling Out
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 15, 2020
Selling Out is a Kelsey Grammer episode overall—Frasier gets into the lucrative world of on air endorsing and finds himself tempted further and further way from his professional ethics as a psychiatrist—but it’s Harriet Sansom Harris who makes it so special. The Grammer stuff would be funny no read more
Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (2020) s01e08 – The Tiger King and I
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 14, 2020
At the end of The Tiger King and I, host Joel McHale—sitting in his living room because the coronavirus pandemic has him in lock down (the Trump Flu plays a big part, presumably, in all the interviewees ready availabilities)—makes a crack about how there’s nothing he won’t do for money, implying read more