The Screengrab : ben-hur

The Screengrab Holiday Special, Part Two: Live Blogging TCM's Easter Sunday Line-Up--"The Green Pastures", "Salome", "Solomon and Sheba", "Ben-Hur"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

6:30 AM: The 1936 The Green Pastures is a musical adaptation of several Bible stories, based on a Broadway show that Marc Connelly adapted from Roark Bradford's book Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun; it features an all-African American cast, led by Rex Ingram as "De Lawd." I know what you're thinking, but it's actually a terrific movie, so I don't have a lot to say about it. Except that it's interesting to compare its staging of the journey out of Egypt and, especially, the Golden Calf period to the way DeMille handled them in The Ten Commandments. For one thing, in Pastures, the decadence that breaks out while De Lawd is otherwise occupied actually looks like something that a rational adult might be tempted to join in on. DeMille's looks like interpretive dance night at Burning Man, and DeMille's voice on the soundtrack explaining how awful it all is doesn't help. (For one thing, he starts out by complaining that the people started expressing their sinful nature by putting on gaudy clothes, and then he starts complaining that they began to take off their gaudy clothes. You just can't win with some people.)

8:15 A.M.: Watching the 1953 Salome soon after seeing The Ten Commandments, one of the first things you're likely to notice is that a lot of the same people tend to turn up over and over in these kinds of pictures. Clearly, if you ran a studio and discovered which actors looked more plausible than not wearing a bedsheet, you didn't want to take too many chances. Here, Cedric Hardwicke is the Roman emperor Tiberius, who fans of I, Claudius will remember as having been quite the dirty fucker, and who plants a mine by giving Pontius Pilate (Basil Sidney) a government job, and Judith Anderson is Queen Herodius, who is always giving King Herod a hard time for his reluctance to have the trash-talking prophet John the Baptist (Alan Badel). Herod is played by Charles Laughton, twenty years after first grabbing Hollywood's attention as Nero in C. B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross; in that movie, he played a powerful monster who enjoyed his work, but here he's troubled and bent out of shape because he doesn't know how to handle this John the Baptist business. Herod is plagued by father issues: he is the son of the earlier King Herod, who, in a similar situation many years earlier, ordered the murder of all male children in the city of Bethlehem, a move that was judged by most observers of the day as a gross over-reaction. Laughton's Herod, who remembers his father's piteous and agonized screams, especially when he read Maureen Dowd's latest column, is plagued by the thought that he might err in the same way his father did, and also by the suspicion that his father always thought his brother Jeb was really the smart one.

Where does Salome enter into this, you ask? It's a good question, and one that seems to have been judged by the screenwriters as not entirely within their powers to answer. Salome is played by Rita Hayworth, which sounds like a good deal at first. But Hayworth, whose production company was responsible for the movie, seems to have been going through one of those periods of a yearning for respect that sometimes befall screen goddesses, sometimes at the oddest of times. In some scenes, Hayworth tries to act seriously by slipping into a bogus British accent, so she'll fit in with her illustrious co-stars (and with her less illustrious ones, chiefly Stewart Granger as a Roman soldier she has the hots for); in others, she tries to convey heavy emotion by breathing so hard between her lines that it's as if she were trying to invent the obscene phone call centuries before some invents the telephone. In the version of this story that we all know and love, Salome dirty dances for the king in order to persuade him to have the Baptist executed for her pleasure. In this one. Rita's Salome takes to the dance floor in a gilded blue robe and modified kaiser helmet in hopes of steaming up Herod's glasses so badly that the old boy can be persuaded to spare the Baptist, but her ploy backfires: seeing her husband watching the evening's entertainment with his tongue in his lap, Herodius leans over and whispers that if he'll have the Baptist beheaded by the time Rita executes her last shimmy shake, she'll put in a good word for him with Rita about what a terrific personality he has. Things wrap up quickly and badly. Rita's reaction to the sight of John's head on a salver makes Herod realize that he'll be sleeping on the couch, and as the people outside bang on the gates, Stewart Granger lectures the royal couple: "Live! Live in torture. May the blood of the man you've murdered rise in your throats to choke you." All that remains is a quick twist ending: Herod and his queen feared John the Baptist as a threat to their power because they thought he might be the messiah, but a final shot of Rita and Stewart Granger standing in a crowd listening to some guy deliver the Sermon on the Mount makes it clear that it is in fact this guy who is the real Keyser Soze. The movie ends with the words "This is the beginning" appearing on screen.

10:00 AM: King Vidor's Solomon and Sheba (1959) has many points of distinction. For one thing, it stands as a lasting reminder that the birth of the state of Israel once seemed like something that Hollywood could stand to cash in on. The story involves a power struggle for the throne of Israeli between the sons of David, Solomon (Yul Brynner) and Adonijah, played by my man George Sanders, with the Queen of Sheba (Gina Lollobrigida) plotting with the Egyptians to destroy the Jewish state. As part of the production design, the Israelis' shields, home furnishings, and maybe their underwear are emblazoned with the Star of David. I'm pretty sure this is anachronistic, but it's not like I was there or have a piece of the copyright action, so what the hey. Perhaps harder to account for is what will strike many people as the central stroke of miscasting that has George Sanders playing the Sonny Corleone role of the fiery-tempered, violent brother while Yul Brynner handles the Michael role as the bookish Solomon who, somebody reminds us every three minutes, is a legend in his own time for being just as wise as shit. (There is no third brother to serve as the Fredo figure, and he is missed.) This is also one of those very special movies in which Yul has hair, perhaps because Solomon's precious brains need all the protection they can get. (Brynner was a late addition to the cast, stepping in for Tyrone Power after Power keeled over from a fatal heart attack as a consequence of doing a fight scene with George Sanders, which, for those of you who don't know, tells you just how bad George Sanders was.)

The movie, which is a long sumbitch, is padded out with some of Solomon's greatest hits scenes, such as the time he pulled the old let's-cut-the-kid-in-two-and-give-each-of-youse-half gag. This is to keep you alerted to the fact that he is, once again, wise. It might have been a nice touch if he could have indicated the depths of wisdom in some simpler fashion, such as dressing sensibly, but that ship had sailed by the time that the costume designer persuaded Yul Brynner to swan about in what looks like a Confederate army leisure suit with a big-ass Star of David medallion that looks like what Bob Guccione might break out for the high holidays. (Brynner's beard and toupee also serve to heighten a previously unsuspected resemblance to Hector Elizaondo.) He may be wise, but he's mortal, and certain things cut off the flow of blood to his brain just as fast as they do with the rest of us, so Sheba Lollobrigida goes to work on him, bewitching him with her ultry-sultry wiles, until God can't take it anymore and starts caving roofs in just to distract Solomon's attention away from his new friend's exposed midsection. After a big battle, Solomon kills George Sanders accidentally on purpose, and then carries Sheba's bruised and broken body into the temple so that God can demonstrate his own unquestioned superiority to Sam the Eagle when it comes to resurrections: he not only restores her to full health but scrubs her face and throws in some Botox. It would be easy to say that King Vidor has done better work, since most of us have. What's a little embarrassing is that one of the occasions when he did better work was Duel in the Sun.

12:30 PM: And now, it's time for the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room of Easter television: Ben-Hur, the 1959 Oscar-festooned super-epic that arguably announced the end of the era of the '50s religious epic, a genre that did not surpass itself so much as max out all its credit cards in this one last wallow. I'll confess right now that I have never fully understood this movie's qualfications as a religious epic. To my eyes, it's a "prestige" (i.e., bloated) version of a Roman sword-and-sandal action movie with brief but strategically placed cameos by a pair of feet and a hand or two that, we are to understand, are connected to the great unseeable presence that is Him. But you go trying to argue with fifty years of conventional wisdom and see where it gets you.

The plot is basically one of those Horatio Alger success stories, as contemporary culture critics understand the Alger books as tributes to the knack for picking out the right rich, powerful man to brown nose. Having had his life destroyed when he doesn't have sense enough to cross the street rather than run into his old school chum Messala--played by Stephen Boyd, an actor so habitually over-intense that I like to imagine he didn't die so much as supernova--our hero, Mr. Hur (Charlton Heston), climbs back to society's upper rungs while showing an unerring instinct for who to save from drowning when pirates attack the ship where he's manning the oars as a galley slave and whose reins to hold during the big chariot race. At the end of that race, you do get to hear the greatest line anybody ever wrote for somebody to say to Charlton Heston, when Pontius Pilate--played by Frank Thring this time--crowns him the winner and says, "Permit us to worship you."

About the only thing else I can think of to say about the movie is that, if you watch it after you've been gorging on films like Salome and Solomon and Sheba, it's impossible not to respect, even with one eye at half-mast and half your brain switched to autopilot, just what a tremendous professional job the director William Wyler did. You might think that someone gainfully employed by a major studio and entrusted with the job of bringing a big epic in on schedule would be able, at a bare minimum of competence, to direct the extras in a crowd scene so that they looked like human beings with some independent life, and to make the sets look as if somebody had lived in them for more than five minutes and as if they were still going to be standing five minutes after the director yelled "Cut!" But whether or not this stuff was worth doing at all, to see if done completely badly is to give you a fresh appreciation for how hard Wyler has to have worked to get it done half-right.

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

THE WORST:

CRASH (2004)

I didn’t actively hate Crash when I first saw it. Paul Haggis’ schematic, artificial examination of race relations in Los Angeles was a pleasant enough way to pass an evening: I enjoyed watching Sandra Bullock play against type as a sour yuppie, and the vignette with Michael Peña and his daughter was sweet (in a Six Feet Under subplot kind of way). But the whole storyline with Matt Dillon’s Racist Cop® was nothing more than Haggis the mainstream milquetoast trying way too hard to provoke, like a suburban teen buying a Slipknot hoodie at Hot Topic with his mom’s credit card and then wearing it to church. The really annoying thing about Crash, though, was the way it allowed Academy voters (after pretty much ignoring films like Hoop Dreams and Malcolm X) to pat themselves on the back for their willingness to confront “the race issue” by rewarding Haggis’ toothless paper tiger of a film while simultaneously snubbing the superior (and timely) “gay cowboy” movie that apparently made them feel icky and uncomfortable.

BEN-HUR (1959)

If David Lean is the best-case scenario for a filmmaker who can hit Oscar's Pavlovian reflexes with deadly aim and still produce something worthwhile, Ben-Hur is pretty much the silliest, most bloated example of "epic" filmmaking there is. As it happens, Ben-Hur is a "milestone" in "Oscar history" because it's one of only three movies to win 11 Oscars; the other two are Titanic and Lord Of The Rings: The Film That Never Ends, which pretty much proves that running way over three hours (and the usual budget) are non-negotiable prereqs. Have you watched all of Ben-Hur lately? It's leaden, endless gay camp (Gore Vidal did it on purpose, but it's still not very funny). The chariot race is great, only because William Wyler ceded directorial duties to Western cowboy-stunt specialist Yakima Canutt, who thankfully had zero interest in propriety or "good" directorial values. On the plus side, this makes Spartacus look faultless.

TOM JONES (1963)

With the tail-end exception of 1969's Midnight Cowboy and this film, the Academy did its darndest to ignore changing cinematic mores in the '60s. So: Tom Jones. Henry Fielding's comic genius is boiled down into a series of too-cute reflexive, winking gestures in a long, overcooked souffle. No surprise: Tom Jones was adapted by John Osborne — the angry young man par excellence, so humorless he was buried with a copy of Hamlet in his pocket, with everyone but Hamlet's lines crossed-out — and clunkily directed (per his usual "form") by Tony Richardson. Together, they water down Godardian gestures for farce, toying with every possible distancing device (it's a silent movie! It's an undercranked Keystone Kops moment!) without any real effect or exuberance. Rarely has jollity seemed this excruciating.

THE STING (1973)

Like Tom Jones, The Sting is another would-be light entertainment that's actually incredibly boring and way too long; the highlight is when Paul Newman says "crap." The best part is the old-school Universal logo at the start, and that's over in thirteen seconds, embedded above for your viewing pleasure. Seriously, why do people like this movie? You can listen to Scott Joplin on your own time and there are many much better Redford and Newman charm vehicles (separately, anyway). One side note: somehow, in 1973, Cries And Whispers was also nominated for Best Picture. Really?

CHICAGO (2002)

Chicago isn't the worst musical of the decade (Moulin Rouge! is hard to beat), but it is kind of magnificently dull. Hollywood always loves a good circle-jerk, and this thinly-veiled "condemnation" (read: winking celebration) of celebrity and the glamor of wrong-doing obliges. Criminal justice is like showbiz, because obviously everything is like showbiz, because everything is like Hollywood. The single most memorable moment in the entire movie isn't any of the murder/juicy stuff; it's Richard Gere dancing in his underwear. Rob Marshall's direction is impressively unimaginative — something most people finally caught onto with Memoirs of a Geisha — and let's not even get into what a disservice this does to the memory of the late, great Bob Fosse: he of the original choreography, he who didn't wait for someone to call him a bastard but interrogated himself for real with All That Jazz. Fosse played for keeps, for better or worse; Chicago plays for winks.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov

The Top Ten Great Scenes From Not So Great Movies (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

The watch scene from THE COTTON CLUB (1984)

Francis Coppola spent the first half of the 1980s despoiling his reputation and laying waste to his bank account by turning out a string of movies that concentrated on technological wizardy and hollow flash to such a degree that involving the audience in what was supposed to be going on became a moot point. Reduced to working as a gun for hire, he signed on to direct this elephantine period musical about the legendary Harlem night spot, and made all the same mistakes that he'd made with his own labor-of-love fiascoes. He and his screenwriting partner, William Kennedy, were not helped by their producers, who signed Richard Gere to star in the movie, and accepted his demand that he get to play a cornet player, before a script had been written. (This meant that Coppola and Kennedy had to vamp their asses off to come up with a story that would be set at a jazz club which only employed black musicians yet had a white musician at its center.) The best scene in the movie is a throwaway moment between the Cotton Club's gangster owner, Owney Madden, and his baleful partner, Frenchy Demange, played by Bob Hoskins and Fred Gwynne, who were not considered to be among the most glittering members of the movie's crowded cast. (At the time, Hoskins was largely unknown in America, and Gwynne, at 58, was just beginning to crawl out from under the shadow of Herman Munster, a role that had left him badly typecast for twenty years.) Frenchy has just been released from the clutches of a sociopathic thug (Nicolas Cage) who kidnapped him for ransom; Owney is reluctant to let Frenchy know how worried he's been for him, and Frenchy is pissed off because he's heard, falsely, thay Owney tried to bargain down the price of the ransom. Reunited, they use the ostensible subject of a busted watch as an excuse to dance around and finally reveal how much their friendship means to them. It's the only fully human scene in the movie, and not only does it not involve the leads, but Coppola and Kennedy didn't write it. Hoskins and Gwynne came up with it while hanging out together on the set, waiting for something to do.

The pie-eating scene from STAND BY ME (1986)

I know that a great many people have tender feelings for this gentle look at the bond between little boys -- or, to put it the way the grown narrator (Richard Dreyfuss) puts it at the very end, "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?" I guess that's sort of true: later on, I was never so hard up for someone to hang out with that I was willing to tolerate having friends who ate worms. The fact is that some of us would rather not even have to think about the possibility that Stephen King has a soft, sensitive side (and that goes triple for Meathead). However, there is one scene that fully lives up to what some of us might have hoped for in a collaboration between the author of Carrie and the director of This Is Spinal Tap. It's the scene where the kid who likes to tell stories (and who's going to grow up to be Richard Dreyfuss, i.e. Stephen King) gathers his mates together and enthralls them with the tale of Lardass, the fat kid who rewards the people of his town for their years of abuse with a little plan involving a pie-eating contest and a dose of castor oil. I never heard any gross-out stories that could top the ones invented by twelve-year-old boys who were secretly a lot less sensitive than they wanted to believe. Jesus, does anybody?

Darth Maul, Sebulba & The Pod Race from THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999)

After the pure, cinematic orgasm of Star Wars blew my pre-pubescent mind beyond any hope of repair, even The Empire Strikes Back was something of a let-down (although watching the teaser trailer for the sequel during one of the theatrical re-releases of the original may stand as the most exciting two minutes of my entire movie-going life). In retrospect, it was pretty obvious that seeing The Phantom Menace as a grown-ass man (especially after HOURS in line waiting for a seat at the Mann’s Chinese screening in Hollywood on opening night) would never come anywhere close to replicating the experience of watching the original trilogy at more or less exactly the right age. But from the dense trade federation blather and Sesame Street robots of the film's opening minutes through all the disheartening talk of mitochlorians and CGI miasma of its overlong running time, Phantom Menace barely even achieved the all-important Star Wars “feel” until Darth Maul unfurled that wicked pissa double-sided light saber and Sebulba hopped into his souped-up muscle car for the big Pod Race midway through the movie. Here, at last, were some worthy additions to that far, far away galaxy I'd known and loved, swaggering, mysterious and truly alien figures who (like Jango and Li’l Boba Fett in Attack of the Clones, General Grievous in Revenge of the Sith and Ian McDiarmid’s series-spanning, scenery-chewing evil Emperor) were far more compelling than whatever nonsense was going on with Jar-Jar Binks and the rest of the so-called “main” characters over in the boring “A” story. And the Ben-Hur pod-race sequence (despite the hokey, sub-Spaceballs intrusion of those “wacky” sports announcers and the fact that Sebulba wuz robbed) was such a breathless, seemingly effortless mini-masterpiece of lucid storytelling and high tech filmmaking that it gave me the smallest flicker of hope that Lucas wouldn’t blow the rest of the new trilogy as badly as he'd blown Episode One.

Click here for Part One & Part Three

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Andrew Osborne

Charlton Heston (1924-2008)

Paul Clark — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 06:39:00 GMT

Charlton Heston, one of only a handful of honest-to-goodness stars remaining from Hollywood's Golden Age, has passed away at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 84 years old. He is survived by Lydia, his wife of 64 years, and his two children and three grandchildren. Details about Heston's death are still sketchy at this point, but he had suffered from symptoms similar to Alzheimer's Disease for years.

Heston began his acting career on the stage, with his first movie role coming from a filmed theatre performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, recorded when Heston was all of 17. But the film that brought him into the public eye was Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar-winner The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he played Ben Braden, the manager of the circus and held his own opposite James Stewart and Betty Hutton, among others. In the next few years, Heston split his time between film and television, one of the few actors who managed to work steadily in both media.

However, his stardom skyrocketed when DeMille came calling again, casting Heston as Moses in his final film, 1956's The Ten Commandments. The role required a truly commanding presence, not just to be convincing as the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt, but also to hold his own against the then-awe inspiring special effects, but Heston pulled it off. From there Heston specialized in similarly larger-than-life heroes, often in period adventures such as The Big Country, El Cid, and Ben-Hur, for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor.

In the 1960s, Heston's stardom continued even as his career choices became more inconsistent- for every Major Dundee, there was a The Agony and the Ecstasy in which he was severely miscast in the role of Michelangelo (yes, that one). But he once again found his groove at the end of the decade with Planet of the Apes, now considered a science fiction classic. It was the first in a series of futuristic dramas for Heston, who went on to appear in the film's sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, before starring in The Omega Man and Soylent Green.

During the 1970s, even as young filmmakers and new actors were gaining clout in Hollywood, Heston stuck to his guns and continued playing the sorts of heroes that made him a star. His presence was right at home in square blockbusters like Earthquake and Airport '75, as well as 1976's bloated war epic Midway. Shortly thereafter, Heston began to turn again to television, starring in a number of TV movies, as well as making a guest appearance on Dynasty as Jason Colby, who was later given his own series, The Colbys.

In the 1990s, Heston's leading-man opportunities had mostly dried up, and after that he worked regularly as a dependable character actor, lending an old-Hollywood authority to films like Tombstone, In the Mouth of Madness, and Any Given Sunday, as well as putting in a cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes remake. In addition, he also did a good amount of voiceover work, his commanding baritone gracing films as diverse as Armageddon and Disney's Hercules. He also showed a surprising ability to kid his square-jawed image. After two hosting stints on Saturday Night Live, he had arguably the best scene in the otherwise disposable Wayne's World 2, playing "The Better Actor." He also appeared in True Lies as Arnold Schwarzenegger's CIA boss, a role that allowed him to pass the torch to Arnold as Hollywood's biggest right-leaning star.

In recent years, Heston's politics have increasingly overshadowed his acting. Heston, a longtime supporter of the National Rifle Association, served as its president in 1998, a position he served in until his diagnosis with Alzheimer's. But rather than remembering Heston for his politics- or his final major big-screen appearance in Michael Moore's Bowing For Columbine- I prefer to remember the good times. Of his storied career, I treasure most two performances he gave nearly two decades apart.

The first, of course, is Touch of Evil. Hollywood legend has it that Orson Welles was only supposed to act in the film, and that Heston (who had only taken the role to be directed by Welles) was largely responsible for Welles directing the film. At first glance, Heston's brand of straightforward heroism seems at odds with Welles' morally twisty vision. However, Heston is exactly what the film needs, an uncomplicated but compelling protagonist to contrast with the rest of the proceedings, in particular Welles' corrupt, seedy Hank Quinlan. It all works perfectly, and Heston deserves much of the credit for this, despite the fact that he may just have made film history's least convincing Mexican.

At the other end of his career, in the middle of his elder-statesman period, Heston gave what may have been his best performance in Kenneth Branagh's epic production of Hamlet. Ever since his early work, Branagh has had a love for stunt casting, often to disastrous ends. But Heston's performance is no stunt. In the small but important role of The Player King, he shows a real aptitude for Shakespeare's language, as well as a sensitivity to the nuances of the material. The first time I saw his performance, I couldn't help but think that I'd underestimated Heston all these years. More than just a presence, Heston was an actor, and one who will be greatly missed.

The Tree Of Libertas Is Watered By The Blood Of Idiots

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As longtime readers will know, I am a dirty stinking liberal. I complain about the depiction of Arab terrorists in movies about Arab terrorists. I make fun of right-wing cultural pest/William F. Buckley son-in-law Brent Bozell on a regular basis for his alleged resemblance to Ghostbusters bureaucrat/asshole Walter Peck. I infiltrate conservative polticial conferences in order to take pills and mock bogus documentaries featuring Ben Stein. I think one of the most irritating things about the modern-day Democratic Party is that they pretend to care about stuff like violence in video games and smut in movies. I would rather watch Ben-Hur ten times in a row than spend five minutes hearing Charlton Heston gas on about gun control, and I'm a gun owner who hates Ben-Hur.

But let it never be said that I don't play fair. I believe in a level playing field, and I've decided that it's about time, given all the posts I've made here linking to bastions of communism like the Guardian and the New York Times, that I give some props to my favorite right-wing movie blog: LIBERTAS!

Founded as the internet component of Jason Apuzzo's Libertas Film Festival, a tiny annual symposium of conservative cinema, the Libertas blog has grown from a mere forum for right-wingers to complain that their values aren't honored by those crooked pornographers in Hollywood to a wonderful full-service site featuring movie news, reviews and writing from the perspective of angry cranks! (As an aside, Libertas and their ideological counterparts love to point to the poor commercial performance of anti-war documentaries as evidence that America isn't interested in such subversive flapdoodle. So where does that leave their claim that no one ever makes movies from a right-wing perspective?)

If you visit Libertas this very day, you'll see an exciting array of crazy cooterness: a review of Definitely, Maybe that condemns its "distasteful display of Hollywood values"; a review of Diary of the Dead that laments George Romero's "increasingly strident politics"; an article which condemns the mainstream media for failing to report Bob Geldof's recent praise of President Bush (although a quick Google News search reveals that it was covered by such non-radical papers as the International Herald-Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Investor's Business Daily); a review which calls the new Harold and Kumar sequel "unfunny and mean-spirited" even though the reviewer has not seen the film; and a pre-emptive condemnation of Iron Man for possibly containing anti-war sentiments. Now that's good film blogging! Enjoy, folks!