After his grandfather Silvio passes away, Mark Pedri is left with a house full of his things, which goes untouched for a while until he decides to sift through what's there. He knew his grandfather, or at least knew him to be a miner who played the accordion and the man with whom he'd spend …
Category: Films
Vertigo
A couple of years ago, I received an Alfred Hitchcock Blu-Ray boxed set for Christmas. I haven't really cracked it beyond the movies I'm very familiar with--Psycho, North by Northwest, Rear Window--so with nothing on a couple of Saturdays ago, we threw in Vertigo, which I think is safe to say is within the Pantheon …
Surviving the Game
"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Carroll is one of those short stories that for at least a couple of generations in high school English. The premise, in case you're not familiar with it, is that a big game hunter named Rainsford falls off of a yacht and washes up on the private island of …
Lucky Them
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/Lucky_Them.jpg Ten years ago, Matthew Smith, one of the more influential voices of his generation, played his final show and disappeared. Nobody has been able to find him, although plenty of people on the Internet and other places swear they've seen him or heard him perform. Especially affected was his then-girlfriend, Ellie Klug . She's …
Uncollecting Catch-Up 6/16/23-6/27/23
After my last post, I went on vacation for the better part of a week and a half and it's taken me a few days to come back and "recover" from it (so to speak). Prior to heading out, I'd put a dent in my piles and lists and had planned to write way more …
He Walked By Night
THIS IS A TRUE STORY. It is known to the Police Department of one of our largest cities as the most difficult homicide case in its experience, principally because of the diabolical cleverness, intelligence and cunning of a completely unknown killer....The record is set down here factually---as it happened. Only the names have been changed---to …
Shoot to Kill
One of the advantages of the Netflix DVD queue was that I didn't have to hunt high and low for a number of movies that are getting increasingly hard to find on streaming platforms. One such movie is 1988's Shoot to Kill, a movie I saw around the time I came out (I want to …
Manhunter
There exists a Michael Mann film that clocks in under two hours. I am sure there are others, but I had been putting off watching 1986's Manhunter because I didn't know if I wanted to make the commitment to a Michael Mann film. I'd also seen it before, having watched it back in high school, …
I, Tonya
A few weeks ago, I reviewed Bud Greenspan's 1994 Olympics documentary, noting that this was one of "my" Olympics, so to speak--one of the games that took place when I really paying attention to everything surrounding them instead of just watching them when they came on. The marquee event, at least as far as network …
Contagion
When the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the United States in March 2019 and we all went into a lockdown, Steven Soderbergh's Contagion jumped to a top spot over various streaming platforms. I didn't choose to watch it then--I opted for Netflix's Tiger King (which, coincidentally, dropped its second season yesterday)--but I made a point …
