Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy

Remembering Stan Freberg

Featured Journal April 8, 2015

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Stan Freberg was one of my heroes; he died on Tuesday at the age of 88. If you don’t know his name, you should, and if you do a search online you may find yourself an instant fan. (example: this TV spot for Sunsweet Prunes) When I was a kid, committing his comedy records to memory and eagerly awaiting his latest commercials, I never dreamed that I would meet him, let alone call him a friend someday. I can’t overstate the influence he had on me during my adolescence; he helped shape my sense of humor and permanently planted his ideas, catchphrases, and voices into my consciousness. Say the name “Ben Franklin” and I think of that founding father uttering the words “life, liberty and…

Remembering Stan Freberg

Blogs April 8, 2015

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Remembering Stan Freberg

Film Noir Returns To Hollywood

Events Exclusive Featured Journal April 7, 2015

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What fun it is to attend the Noir City Festival at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood every spring. It’s hard to believe that it’s been seventeen years since Eddie Muller first programmed this exhilarating event with the American Cinematheque. He and his partner-in-noir Alan K. Rode host the screenings that bring a large and diverse audience to the Egyptian for classics, discoveries, and bread-and-butter pictures that otherwise wouldn’t get a chance to be projected in 35mm on the big screen. Last Friday’s opening bill paid tribute to Ann Sheridan with a double-bill:Woman on the Run (1950), recently restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Film Noir Foundation with funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and the 1947 Warner Bros. drama The…

Film Noir Returns To Hollywood

Blogs April 7, 2015

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Film Noir Returns To Hollywood

Gray and Grim: Effie Gray

Film In Theaters Movie Reviews April 2, 2015

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Dakota Fanning is so good in the title role that she almost validates Effie Gray…but not quite. Emma Thompson wrote this period piece, which features her real-life husband, Greg Wise, in a juicy leading role. But aside from good casting and a vivid recreation of Victorian England, the film has little to recommend it. This is the real-life story of the respected but emotionally frigid 19th century art critic John Ruskin, who met and impressed Euphemia Gray when she was a girl. When she turned 19 he married her but never had sexual relations with her; in fact, he scorned and shunned her from their wedding night onward. All of this is portrayed with a heavy hand and a deadening monotony, under the direction of…

Furious 7 Offers High-Flying Fun

Film In Theaters Movie Reviews April 2, 2015

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In the long and winding road of Fast and Furious movies, the latest entry ranks as one of the most entertaining—and outlandish. I found the last film preposterous, but this one sets its larger-than-life tone early on and never veers from it. (Cars parachuting onto a treacherous mountain road? You bet!) Furious 7 is like all 12 chapters of an old Saturday matinee serial mashed-up together with dashing heroes and heroines, a seemingly indestructible villain, and a series of challenges that inspire one enormous action sequence after another. This is no longer about rubber hitting the road: it’s about using cars as props in a series of highly imaginative (read: impossible) stunts that pump your adrenaline and make for high-flying escapist fun. At the core of all…