Thelma Todd’s Café Can Now Be Yours
Thelma Todd’s Café Can Now Be Yours
CATCHING UP WITH BLU-RAYS
As I said in my recent post, I’ve been laggard in keeping up to date on this website. The…
Thelma Todd’s Café Can Now Be Yours
I always find it surreal to drive on Pacific Coast Highway and pass the attractive building that once housed Thelma Todd’s Café. It looks just the same as it does in postcards from the 1930s. For years it has been home to Paulist Productions, the company that produced Father “Bud” Kieser’s Insight television show. Now it’s up for sale, the price just shy of eight million dollars. If Thelma Todd is remembered at all—except by diehard movie buffs—it’s because her untimely death in 1935 remains on every roster of Hollywood scandals and unsolved mysteries. I prefer to remember her as one of movies’ most delightful comediennes. The blonde beauty was a mainstay at the Hal Roach studio, where she appeared opposite Laurel and Hardy, Charley…
Rare Finds On DVD
Rare Finds On DVD
Leonard Maltin and Grae Drake’s Fall Movie Preview Review: Watch it on Reelz
Leonard Maltin and Grae Drake’s Fall Movie Preview Review: Watch it on Reelz
Fury Movie—Review
Fury isn’t bad, but it promises more than it can deliver. Perhaps, if you’ve never seen a World War II movie, or any story about the roughhouse camaraderie of men in battle, you’ll be forgiving of its tropes. The battle scenes are intense and the characters well-drawn, if taken from a familiar Hollywood playbook. But writer-director David Ayer set out to show us a side of WWII we haven’t seen before and in that he has fallen short. As a throwback to 1940s storytelling, Fury does score points. Brad Pitt does a solid job as a smart, swaggering tank commander nicknamed Wardaddy who leads his crew into Germany in April of 1945, during the war’s final days. There is mortal danger at every turn, lurking…
Birdman—Movie Review
Birdman is audacious, original, and bold. It’s also inscrutable, off-putting, and overlong. To be sure, there is much to admire in Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu’s mad jumble of a movie, which takes place in and around the St. James Theatre in Manhattan and unfolds as if it were one long, continuous take. This visual equivalent of an author’s stream-of-consciousness narration is impressive, and sometimes arresting, but it can also be exhausting. The same can be said of the protagonist, a wildly insecure actor named Riggan Thomson. (His peculiar moniker is emblematic of the film as a whole. Riggan?) Michael Keaton delivers a bravura performance as a once-successful Hollywood star, about to make his Broadway debut, who is desperate for approval. Most fans still associate him with…
The Book of Life—Movie Review
The Book of Life is one of the most unusual animated films I’ve ever seen; its characters and settings inspired by Mexican folk art and its story drawn from the mythology surrounding The Day of the Dead. Merging that concept with the rapid-punchline humor we’re accustomed to seeing in Hollywood cartoon features is unsettling at times, but kids probably won’t mind the mashup. What won me over was the striking look of the picture, especially the way its characters are depicted as hand-carved wooden figures. My hat’s off to director/co-writer/character designer Jorge R. Gutierrez (of the popular animation series El Tigre) for realizing his vision—with more than a little help (I suspect) from producer Guillermo del Toro. (Gutierrez’s wife, Sandra Equihua, shares credit for character…
